Ansett Australia

[B33R]

9 years today, in the wee hours of September 14...

I wasn't involved with Ansett but I certainly recognise it for its place in our nation's aviation history - and remembered it fondly today! Lots of memories as a kid!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4b/Ansett_logo.svg/200px-Ansett_logo.svg.png



...let's leave the politics and whatnot out of this perhaps!

[Skystar320]

A lovely airline with some of the best crew I have ever had the chance to meet, wether it be travelling in a 146 across the desert or doing a quick jump down to melbourne on the 767.

Crew always had a smile and never turned down a visit to the flightdeck!

Pity that AirNZ screwed a great company! But... lets leave it at that

[mattyj]

Too late Skystar..pandoras box!!

AirNZ tried valiantly to UNscrew it but failed and screwed themselves in the process

[Whiskery]

This thread is going to last about 5 minutes.

[Tidbinbilla]

As long as it doesn't start getting personal, Whiskery, I can't see any reason why it should go.

I think we all know someone affected by AN's demise :ouch:

[Wally Mk2]

....................Ansett ain't the only thing that's gone here.............. Wmk2

[relax737]

Great company!!

[ZK-NSN]

Pity that AirNZ screwed a great company! But... lets leave it at that
Well now we have Jetstar in nz...... shall we call it even?

[ampclamp]

ZK NSN, Well that is a touche' if ever I saw one :hmm:

Air NZ had some weird ideas of getting "big" back then and were sucked in by Newscorp when the cupboard was pretty well bare.They did not exactly help but the real damage was done years before.Bad timing and paid too much for a shell.

I miss AN a lot.They were a very good airline that sadly , failed on several fronts.
Greetings to all my former colleagues.

[ForkTailedDrKiller]

Hmmmm - as Self Loading Freight and a frequent flyer with both since the early 70's, I gotta say that given a choice I would pick TAA/Australian/Qantas over Ansett every time !

Dr :8

PS: Ahhh, the good old days. Climb aboard in Isa and live it up in 1st Class on red wine and cavier all the way to Brissie!

[RatsoreA]

Can anyone else hear that high pitched whine? That'd be Sir Reg turning over in his grave at about 20000rpm.

They were always happy to share a jumpseat, and many's the time I never even saw my allocated seat in lieu of one with a better view!

[Eastwest Loco]

Skystar

It was Singapore Air that junked Ansett.

Part of their master plan to collapse the Airline by installing an inept caretaker in the form of NZ (they had 2 people on the NZ board) as they knew they would cause its collapse.

It was seen as their best chance to gain Australian domestic incarriage/oncarriage infrastructure as well as the prized ex Australia trans Pacific rights they are still willing to sacrifice small animals to get their claws upon.

All went well until certain swarthy gentlemen flew commercial airliners into buildings and a field about 48 hours before stage 1 of the plan was complete.

SQ knew that the only way to rebirth Ansett was to remove the top 3 levels of management. The rest of the airline was fine with great standards and staff. Just the fact that Murdoch and Abeles has gouged all Reg built up by flogging off the owned fleet and leasing a new fleet meant AN was entering a flat spin. Of course the monies received disappeared into the parent companies.

The most cost effective method of doing this was to collapse the airline through an inept 3rd party (enter TEAL) rather than have to pay out massive redundancies to do it with an operating concern, all be it severely ruptured financially.

All went well and was on track until the events of 9/11. Sing Air then slunk off into the darkness with no loss of face. The mud all hit NZ.

It was no secret that Ansett was about to fall over. A client of mine is an operative in the field for the UN complete with pale blue passport. He was in up country Sri Lanka on assignment in a place where they worried if the terrorists were OK if they hadn't heard the 1st hand grenade go off at the checkpoint for workers by 0800.

They were advised through the UN to change all Ansett booking they held to an alternate carrier a full 2 weeks before the collapse.

There was a whole lot more going on than we will ever know.

I was born a TAA brat and worked for them, loved my East West Airlines and worked for a short time at Ansett Adelaide and love the place and the guys and girls.

The big shame today is the airlines don't want staff to the degree that one day your boarding pass may indicate that you have to fly the service.

Best all

EWL

[Checkboard]

Two weeks before the collapse Ansett was pretty obviously on it's last legs. Catering had stopped, and I remember every port I turned up at, I wondered if there would be any ground staff to meet us.

I flew my last Ansett flight on September 14, if I recall correctly.

[Buster Hyman]

All I can say is thank Gawd Fox & that retail muppet Lew didn't get their grubby hands on it! :suspect: Better to have let it die than have TESNA/Queenscross bend us over! :=

[Skystar320]

It was Singapore Air that junked Ansett

Hardly! Singapore Airlines showed interest in purchasing Ansett but Air New Zealand had the first dibs and right of refusal which they took it.

SQ came out flying with some pretty sound business plans for when they got a control and I daresay AirNZ wanted to be the big company and blocked the sale to SQ.

[ampclamp]

Politics stopped SIA getting AN.Yes they were hesitant and dithered but at the behest of politics I am sure. Foreign ownership is a sensitive issue now and more so then.
Trust me on this, Temasek via Singtel had just bought Optus and PM Howard did not want it to look like the Asians were buying everything (he was sensitive about the asian thing back then you may remember) and the then cabinet held out on SIA with the very effective lobbying of the Qantas board and execs who ran the scare campaign.
Costello was pro SIA but was over ruled.

Having worked for AN for years they were as good as broke when air NZ bought them.TNT and News had used the cashflow without reinvestment and restructuring.I had discussions with a senior manager in the late 80's when rumours abounded about their viability. They were not going well.
Rod Eddington was tasked with tarting it up for sale and did a brilliant job sucking in an less than brilliant air nz board at the time.

All water under the bridge now.AN were poorly run for many years and we suffered the consequences.
It is a matter of interest but that's all.I am getting on with life.

[Sunfish]

I'm very glad I left when I did. I only have happy memories.

..Bowling out the Wombat during lunchtime cricket in front of the 767 hangar....

[Eastwest Loco]

Skystar

Look at the bigger picture. NZ did indeed want AN.

Why?

Inststigation from their board which included 2 SQ implants.

It aint rocket science.

Best all

EWL

[Checkboard]

TNT sold their 50% to Air NZ for $500 million, with an option to purchase the second half from Newscorp.

Rod Eddington was bought in "It's a great airline but a bad business" and did a pretty good job of restructuring and returning the airline to profit.

Newscorp then announced the sale of the second 50% to SQ :ok: Airline saved! :} SQ with enough cash to re-fleet the airline. :ok:

Air NZ then said "Hang on - we have first dibs on Newscorp's 50%" and eventually negotiated to buy the second 50% for $530 million. Once they had managed that HUGE bite of the cherry, attempting to swallow an airline bigger than they were, they then sacked the management team Rod had just managed to put in place. Rod, understandably, resigned - leaving Ansett once again rudderless.

Air NZ then asked SQ to buy a large chunk of their stock, thus revealing that their plan in acquiring Ansett was so that THEY could get their hands on SQ's cash, as any cash for Ansett would have to flow through parent company Air NZ.

SQ reluctantly agreed (for $NZ 2.60 per share, if I recall), and Air NZ turned to Helen Clark's Labour government to get approval for the deal. The Labour government said "Air NZ is our national carrier, and it will remain at least 50% NZ owned. As Air NZ is already 49% foreign owned, we will not approve the deal."

The share price dumped to 60c NZ, SQ pulled out, and Air NZ had to admit that they didn't have the cash to run Ansett. The September 11 attacks occurred, and Air NZ realised they could use the biggest news event of the decade to run interference with their decision to cut Ansett loose (the biggest corporate collapse in Oz history, with 13500 employees losing their jobs all on the same day.:{)

[Sunfish]

Not only did Air New Zealand not have the cash to run Ansett, they didn't have the skills to run it either. I know for a fact that the AN treasury and accounting folk were way ahead of Air NZ, yet who was "let go"? Then there were the pallets of extremely valuable rotables that "vanished", not that Korda Mentha knew a constant speed drive from a carrot.

[Captain Dart]

The real Ansett ended 21 years ago. Abeles had asset-stripped it anyway and it never really recovered from the disastrously-handled events of 'that year' by a fool of a Prime Mininister and AN management who fancied themselves as 'head kickers'.

All that remained was a hollow shell of a once great airline and a 'mutual admiration society' of post-dispute pilots (to put it diplomatically), and other employees, who never woke up to what was really going on.

[Anthill]

This is truth:

My wife had a friend whose sibling was on the Air NZ board. In June 2001, this friend of the wife was at our house for a BBQ. The friend asked me "How do you think Ansett is travelling at the moment" I replied "not well I have applied for a job at XXXXX". The friend then told me "That is a very, very good idea".

The significance of this conversation was lost on me untill September of that year.

[Trent 972]

The demise of ANSETT began when the The Slaves of Neptune went to the The Swamps of Jupiter and created The Fires of Mercury. After The Robot Revolution sold off The Rings of Saturn, and set off The Volcanoes of Venus, all that was left of The Shrinking Spaceman was The Cloud of Death and eventually The Wandering Asteroid became The Dark Planet, all in just the first season.

There you go Captain Dart, I googled it. :ok:
sui generis

[mustafagander]

Trent,

Can you please PM me the name/number of your dealer? It looks like he has some excellent weed!! :}

[Captain Dart]

He Googled my nom-de-guerre, which is based on the hero of an obscure, but imaginative, kids' TV 'space opera' from the 1960s. It was called 'Space Patrol' and was similar in format to 'Fireball XL-5' but 'darker'.

Not sure of the relevance of the sui generis; after leaving Ansett during 'that year', I moved on to bigger and better things.

Many fond memories of the Fokker, though, especially northern Tassie flights (never got a 'track trip' :{). AN's standardisation, pre-89 flight operations management and quality of manuals were the best I've experienced in over three decades of aviation.

[Captain Dart]

And to you, Trent! I'd go along with that. It says a lot that during one dispute pilots' meeting, the Chief Pilot, Henry T, walked in to the assembled multitude. All conversation stopped and every pilot in the room stood up out of respect (Henry of course never 'went back').

I wouldn't even feed some of the clowns in management in my current airline.

[UAL Furlough]

Ansett,,,,some of the greatest flight crew and mates that I have ever had the pleasure to be associated with....

And some of the worst!!

Sad really....