MERGED: Alan's still not happy......

[1A_Please]

LC may be backing AJ but the "independent" directors need to take a stand very soon. If, as some are forecasting, QF ends up being sold off to a private equity organisation some of these directors should be very scared about a class action from small shareholders who come after them claiming their interests were not protected.

I bet the annual premium on QAN's Directors and Officers Insurance is about to take a hike.

[Dark Knight]

Aussie Qantas says using butter from Denmark helps the Aussie transport industry. Aussie farmers, not so much. - Michael Smith News

It's possible that Brigitte doesn't realise it, but she has given all Australians a useful template on which to commence further correspondence with Qantas.

Dear Qantas,
Thank you for your advertising campaign about your Australian-ness.
We appreciate your decision to put ads in the paper. While you talk about your greatness, Singapore Airlines has much better service, lower fares and they are not so up themselves.
I can assure you that most Australians would never compromise on ideals like the undesirability of getting involved with Islamists - and Singapore Airlines seems to be able to make its way without compromising its own morality in that regard. We also feel that using Singapore Airlines has a positive impact on other Australian industries dependent on reliable service and getting there on time.

Bull**** ads not backed up by action like yours are always appreciated by an Australian public after a good laugh, so we are dead-set pissing ourselves that you reckon you need handouts while you pay for laugh-a-thons in the paper.

While we have no plans to change our airline travel back to you, we have lined the bottom of the cocky's cage with the newspaper and he's ripped into your red ad with gay abandon.

Thank you again for living the brand values.

Have a nice day.

Michael Smith News

The story and subject matter sums up the Qantas attitude well.

[VH-Cheer Up]

What on earth is keeping Alan Joyce and Leigh Clifford in place? Have the other directors no spines at all? When will one/some of them stand up against Clifford, move a motion of no confidence against the chair, and vote to sack Joyce?

What are we missing here? Is there some secret grand plan being executed with acute precision that sees QF returning to profit, paying shareholder dividends again, and starting to eat its competition? At what point must the ASX be informed about such matters?

Somebody? Anybody? Bueller?

[Oldmate]

Plan was to run Virgin out of cash, create a monopoly, make big profits. Lots of desperate re-planning taking place now behind closed doors. Many big announcements to come over next 6 months.

[Ixixly]

VH-Cheerup, why bother making a fuss when you're going to be paid anyway? Probably what LC is telling them in their well catered meetings "Just sit tight everyone, don't bother making a fuss or you'll be gotten rid of, we want 'enthusiastic' members who are 'part of the team' and willing to play ball!" at which point they all go back to feeding from the trough...

[FYSTI]

At the risk of assigning patterns to randomness, perhaps there are a few clues for the preliminary post-mortem.

Post #1195

Originally Posted by Capt Kremin

I recall pilots recounting a conversation with Dixon, where stated that his accountants told him, to the week, when AN would go broke.

• Borghetti "knows" this - he understands the thinking in QF HQ. He knows how they break out the figures on competitors. In short, he knows QF's "know knows".
• Borgehetti probably has a good idea of the QF accounts & can reverse engineer the annual ASX figures to assess the true state of QF internals, again, knowing their thinking.
• Borghetti "knows" that Joyce would hold the 65% line in the sand and fight to the death.
• Borghetti knows that any over-capacity hurts QF more than Virgin (QANTAS Domestic chief executive Lyell Strambi has thrown down the gauntlet to competitor Virgin Australia, warning that he will add two planes for each one the smaller airline adds to protect the flying kangaroo's patch). ie every unit of over-capacity hurts QF twice as much.
• Borghetti probably hypothesises that Joyce wants to see Virgin killed Ansett style. Oldmate nails it:
  Originally Posted by Oldmate

  Plan was to run Virgin out of cash, create a monopoly, make big profits.

• Recalling Sun Tzu “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” he just has to appear like things are grim. Of course, Borghetti has already tapped his shareholders for pre-approval, but not implemented the capital raising.
• Borghetti has set the trap for Joyce, sits back and waits. Joyce keeps punching, burning the cash pile. Just when Virgin appears to be out of cash, it raises capital.
• Joyce realises the trap, spits the dummy & cries foul. He then realised he has been outfoxed by Borghetti.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

[1A_Please]

Plan was to run Virgin out of cash, create a monopoly, make big profits.

Lightning doesn't strike twice and VA is a much more viable business model than AN was in its dying days. The big shareholders were always going to support it. If AJ thought otherwise, he is a dill.

[Ida down]

Tartare, if the pilots ran their flight decks, like the suits ran the actual airline, then we would have to expect more than one of aircraft shaped smoking black holes, decorating the landscape. You should understand, that the majority of Pilots and Engineers are frustrated, because the sheer nature of their jobs, require discipline, ability to make good decisions at the right time, ability to think quickly and on their feet, to make rational decisions, and to know when to pull back. They expect the CEO and the board to have the same ability, to have the ability they are paid to have, and yet the whole box and dice is forever in trouble, with poor decisions, from the failure to buy the B777, the firing of good experienced staff, causing disunity with staff, Jetstar Asia, and on and on it goes. For people who have to constantly make good, rational decisions, its frustrating to say the least, and even more frustrating, is the fact that their jobs seem to be forever on the line, because of the stupidity of the suits.

[tartare]

Couldn't agree more Ida.
But I'd offer a slightly different perspective.
Someone once said to me airline pilots are by nature cautious, conservative, meticulous.
If they're not, people die.
But the business side of running an airline often counter- intuitively demands different and sometimes opposite skills, which most pilots (not all) find it hard to get their head around.
The person who said that to me was one Robert Ian Fyfe.
Noting that - it's surprising to learn that you do not have a flying management pilot with a formal position at Exco level - as far as I can see.
Very surprising indeed.

[Nikki_in_oz]

You could always try and poach Willie Walsh from IAG, but I suspect you may not enjoy the ruthless sorting out that QF might get as a result.

I suspect QF would emerge, after some pain, to be a better, leaner, financially stronger company.

.....and I believe Walsh was formerly a Pilot, so would satisfy some of your cravings for a Pilot at the top!

[Ixixly]

Nikki_In_Oz, I think you'd find the Pilot group and Qantas as a whole would be fine with what you're suggesting so long as it wasn't veiled behind great mounds of bulls**t with the company being treated like Mushrooms. That, IMHO, is the biggest issue right now, how the current Management treat everyone like fools, they try to feed us all their crud and just expect us to swallow it. If they were more open and honest I think you'd find the Company far more willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

[itsnotthatbloodyhard]

Personally, I don't really care if there's a pilot on the board or exco or wherever (and considering some of the likely candidates among our management pilots, it might be better if they weren't). I just think it'd be nice to have someone who was interested in actually running the joint properly, rather than carrying on with the pointless and destructive smartarsery we've seen for the last few years.

[Mstr Caution]

Heard an interesting angle today.

The JQ franchise steamroller thru Asia has been put on hold.

Hrdlicka was confident the JQ HKG venture would be flying by years end.

Regulatory delays have taken the wind out of those sails.

JQ has had to concentrate on it's current franchises, rather than continue work on planned new ventures.

Poor Alan.

[waren9]

Hrdlicka was confident the JQ HKG venture would be flying by years end.

if, by years end she means 2014, she might be closer to the mark.

[Stalins ugly Brother]

She meant to say " by worlds end"

Ixixy has hit the nail on the head.

Remember, there is only one letter difference between running a company and ruining one, maybe when little Al signed on the dotted line he misread or missed pronounced his contract details.

[The The]

Plan was to run Virgin out of cash, create a monopoly, make big profits.

Utter rubbish!

It was/is a simple game of who blinks first. QF want (need) the 65% line, they thought they could sustain capacity growth to hold the line until DJ blinked and backed off. Joyce admitted as such that he would be very very happy to keep it that way with zero domestic growth. The problem is that DJ now has more capital backing to crack the 65% line and QF can no longer afford to hold it; as less than 65% causes a lot of problems to QF.

Joyce cannot accept less than 65% because Jetstar makes up a significant part of that 65%. Jetstar has gotten so big that the 65% is necessary to keep frequency of QF against DJ for the business (super profit) market. Joyce is trapped, he wants to grow Jetstar, but he cannot because that would mean giving up more QF market share as DJ adds capacity. He cannot shrink Jetstar as the cost base for domestic then goes up as it has been neglected for too long. It's a lose lose situation for Joyce.

I actually think the whole Dixon v Joyce spat comes down to this. Dixon knew that growing Jetstar too much domestically was a mistake. It is the domestic market that matters, as the international market contains too many unknowns for even Dixon. The idea that the Dixon/Joyce spat was over the Emirates deal is just a smokescreen. It is all about the domestic market and Dixon could see where it was headed. Dixon knows Borghetti very very well and could see how he would lead Joyce into the trap with Joyce believing Jetstar would solve everything.

Virgins interest in Tiger just reinforces the paranoia at QF. There is no way Tiger will ever be but a small player in the Virgin arsenal. Borghetti is way too smart to let Tiger grow the way jetstar did.

[peuce]

.... I just think it'd be nice to have someone who was interested in actually running the joint properly, rather than carrying on with the pointless and destructive smartarsery we've seen for the last few years.

Perhaps someone who wants to run Qantas, primarily, as an Airline....not as just a business.

...although they aren't doing too well at that either....

[Ida down]

Tartare, I am sure QF do have both pilots and engineers, who are more than suitable, to take up executive positions within the company. Major positions. But they also probably reason, that it would be equivalent to going out and constantly bashing their collective heads against the garage door, and the extra money and stress would not be worth it. As I stated earlier, up until the 80's anything to do with flight WAS run by Pilots and Engineers, and remarkably well, and then the bean counters took over. The results speak for themselves. Ansett, gone, TAA merged, QF in deep ****e. All since the 80's. The reality is until you get rid of this incompetent board, until you put in a CEO, who really knows their stuff, eg:Gail Kelly, et al, who recognises their staff's worth, and who would be willing to put a Senior Pilot and Engineer in a advisory position, along with other people who actually know what they are doing, and are well versed in foresight, insight, and competence, QF will continue to go along like a duck, appear to working on the surface, but paddling like buggery underneath.

[busdriver007]

Willie Walsh...yes he is a former pilot but another Irishman? Even the Irish admit themselves that the Irish think they are god's gift to aviation but they are not...They are full of it however

[hotnhigh]

You need a CEO and senior management that are not driven by the bonus culture. Ie. paid salaries and thats it, from the Ceo down.
Should pilots get a bonus for not crashing?
If the board, in their current self induced crisis,had the balls and implemented that for starters, a lot of issues would not occur if there was a collective longer term vision.
And any exec bleating that the bonus structure is there is to attract "the best" can be the first to go.
"The best" have had their time and well and truly screwed the pooch.