Pinky the pilot

What Keg said in his last two posts.

And tipsy2 in his second last post makes a very valid point I should think.

Compylot

Girls please..

I know that some of you think you have all the solutions to every problem your airline faces, all gleaned from the fantastically diverse and wide ranging role that you perform within your company.

It has been proven that the perceived ability of ones own solutions to a current airlines woes is proportional to their length of service, amount of posts on pprune and also to the amount of 'red' one has consumed in an attempt to be seen as cultured and intelligent. (because we all know bogans, I mean Jetstar passengers, don't drink red!)

So, while it may seem like nothing short of a massive mistake to appoint such an obverse aviation heathen to the Qantas board, rest assured that the people who make these decisions perhaps drink a bottle or two of red of higher quality than that which you may find in the Dan Murphy's discount bin.

Now, don't you have some simulator study to concentrate on?

cattletruck

Actually, I would have used the term bunch of bum feelers to describe that lot.

Boney

Comply

I don't think anyone posting on this thread is seriously suggesting that Pilots have all the answers or that a Pilot should be on the board. That is ridiculous.

However, I believe people are dismayed by the many non airline related experience people that have graced the board, particularly over the last 15 years.

Peter Cosgrove was on the board since 2005 I think and left recently to become the Governor General. I find it hard to figure out anything that he could have provided to the board that would have been of any value. No wonder he hung around for nearly a decade with his snout in the trough.

Todd Samson may work out OK. Being from a marketing background, he will have a very strong radar for seeing/hearing bull$hit and being able to create some for Q's benefit. But unfortunately, his skills may only be properly utilised if he were joining a board that actually had deep airline experience.

"What's a triple seven, is that the size of our next bonus and how many zero's are on the end of it?"

neville_nobody

Except that it's the ONLY department that actually generates the main stream of income. All other departments are secondary to flight ops. Flights stops, so does your airline.

Problem in airline management these days is that no flightops people get senior management in any airline and people from other departments end up pushing their own barrows which has NOTHING to do with your core business.

c100driver

I know what you are trying to imply by talking "departments" but, Flight Operations is the department that delivers the base product (a seat from point A to point B). Flight Operations Departments are alway a "cost" on a ledger!

If the marketing and sales department cannot deliver enough customers at a price that revenue is greater than the costs your airline will also stop, it will just take a little longer. If your customer service is less that what the customer expects for the price of the seat paid then your airline will wither and die a slow painful death. Every department is co-dependant on the other.

IMHO Having someone with a good marketing background is good for the future of QF because in my experience they are ones that ask the hard questions of "what are we trying to sell" and "what are we trying to be"?

What is QF; "cheap and cheerful JetStar" or "quality full service Qantas". That is the real question that the QF board needs to answer. At the moment they are neither and are being picked off at both ends by the likes of Tiger, Air Asia, Lion at the LCC end by SQ, Emirates, Qatar at the high end.

MBA v Ops Experience
The MBA usually has the ability to analyse and develop the answer to the question but does not know what the question should be!
However the Ops experience knows the question that should be asked but usually does not have the skill to properly analyse or develop the answer.

-438

To suggest Pilots are insulated in their role in an airline is either a wind up or shows a complete lack of understanding of the day to day job.
Whilst pilots may not know what happens in the ivory towers, the opposite is true at the coal face.
Hard for many to understand but airlines make money flying passengers & freight.
Pilots interact with all facets of the money making part of the business on a daily basis. It's a pity management do not.
A typical day has the Captain speaking directly with airport managers, engineers, flight planners, Customer Service Managers, cabin crew, passengers, baggage & freight loaders, ATC, dispatchers, refuellers etc.
Generally anything of consequence to a flight will be relayed to the flight crew.
The visibility of the organisation from an operational perspective from the flight crew should not be underestimated.
Senior management could learn much from spending the day following a crew around the network.

Oriana

Often-times, the pilots are the ones that unravel the cluster-fcuk that the bean counters created on a good looking spreadsheet.

BTW, Lufthansa has pilot and engineer members on their board.

Popgun

Its a VERY basic concept. Get out of the ivory tower, get out to the pointy end with the front line troops and observe in real time the core business. Whether on the flight deck, in the cabin, in the terminals or in the hangar etc...

No matter what the service industry, nothing substitutes for removing potentially sycophantic layers of mid and low-level management filters by visiting the coal face, unannounced, every once in a while.

In a previous company, it was done every 3 - 4 months. In the 5 years with my current employer I have never seen it (nor heard of it) ever happen.

And when there IS notice of a senior management visit, for say a meeting, then all the troops are deployed to make sure everything looks well oiled, and spick and span in the same way that the main street in a dusty, run-down country town will be spruced up to welcome the Queen!

PG

gordonfvckingramsay

Compylot, I don't remember reading any post here suggesting a pilots only board is the answer, but I think it's sufficient to say a board lacking any "coal face" experience is not the answer either.

We merely lament the decay of our airline at the hands of a bunch of chaps who are there to pillage and nothing else. Even more galling is the fact that it's not even good business! You don't need an MBA to know that.

I know, don't feed the trolls.........don't feed the trolls

Rudder Sir

There's room for marketing experts on an airline board, even if they have no specific aviation experience. What is the key point of difference between Air NZ and Qantas? Marketing!

This guy is incredibly smart and has his finger on the pulse of modern business practice. He's not just a salesman (as some have stated), he's an ethical business executive who understands the need for sound corporate governance.

It's a very good move for Qantas.

SeeBee

No Rudder Sir, you have missed the point entirely. ANZ is different to QF because of the basic strategy. The low cost was brought back to mainline, the fleet acquisition plan was clearly defined and the core business was adhered to rigidly. I'm sure marketing played a part but without the afore mentioned points, it would not have been so successful. Please go and learn some history!

Have fun.

V-Jet

More importantly, EVERYONE at ANZ knows they work for ANZ, the national flag carrier of New Zealand.


I don't know if the QF Board is capable of answering exactly who they work for and what the company actually does. Senior management certainly can't...


A pretty basic question that most Company's employees know instantly. Who do we work for and what do we do?

Rudder Sir

Yes, a strategy that has its roots in marketing and brand management. My point stands, but thanks for the history lesson.

Seeing as we are trading helpful advice - perhaps you could benefit from finding out what marketing actually is.

Keg

Marketing and brand management means nothing without knowing what the hell it is you are and what you do to start off with.

I'd argue that Qantas is sometimes excellent at marketing and brand management but that they've struggled at times over the last decade to work out the first two points of who they are and what they do. In fact on occasions they've been so focussed on 'the brand' and how that's marketed that perhaps they'd forgotten at those times that they need to deliver 'a product' that underpins the brand. That's the misses in marketing over the last decade even when they've been excellent. They've been marketing something which hasn't been backed up by 'the product'. I'd argue that the two previous campaigns to the most recent one are excellent examples of the issue of not knowing how you are and what you do.

Anyway, back to the books.

Rudder Sir

Fair enough Keg, but what I was really getting at is that all that stuff about who you are and what you do IS essentially the 'product' and therefore, marketing. I.e. it's understanding your customer base and devising a value proposition that's commercially viable.

I think maybe marketing gets mistaken for advertising sometimes? It's really the function at the root of how you choose to run an airline.

Jetsbest

I get what you're saying Rudder and I think Todd Sampson could be good for QF.

As for the schism between the QF board and employees in general, and pilots in particular here, I know where the derision started.

In the past few years there has been little from 'the top' but disingenuous and misleading spin along with a refusal to answer valid and logical questions about obvious flaws in the public pronouncements about QF-group segments' products/fleet/profitability/efficiency/etc...(except when confronted by the inconvenient reality that pilot experience, training and proficiency saved QF's bacon...again; see QF32/72/etc)

So, the pilots aren't perfect and come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and abilities, but good leadership could have enunciated the challenges and plans while bringing a willing group of participants along for the ride in 'the transformation'. Evidently though, 'the facts' could neither speak for themselves nor bear closer scrutiny in persuading minds, and so the Board chose 'war'.

Honestly, there was a better way. The 'Koolaid' still doesn't taste any better now that the rhetoric is changing and AJ etc stand to make, after a creative and arbitrary pay freeze, many millions in bonuses from a deferred share bonus scheme. Are the public are supposed to applaud their integrity?

Compylot

Somehow I don't think that Todd Samson has been employed for his opinion on what engines are best suited for the A320 NEO or 737 MAX.

We can all wax lyrical about how well these marvelous pioneers of yesteryear did such an outstanding job of creating great legacy Airlines, but please..
...with the greatest of respect to all these fine people, (how many are still even alive?) their experience in the cockpit during their day and in their time of course meant they were very effective leaders who no doubt contributed immensely to the success of the airline they were involved with... back in 1972.

Lets fast forward to 2015 and in this day and age, to expect that pilots, and only pilots, have the knowledge, experience, fortitude and experience to bring the best intelligent decisions at a board room level smacks of ignorance and ego.

Does it? Even as an FO I don't see Captains interacting this much with such a wide variety of airport staff. In fact I see Captains caring more about their social media status updates than their passengers and cabin crew...

It's a job.

One that has become highly automated, semi skilled and really not that hard (or important)

There.

dr dre

Wow compylot, that's very inconsistent with you previous posts

Please Compylot, if your going to troll, at least be consistent!

Rudder Sir

Some interesting points of view.

Just to clarify, I think it's absolutely important to have pilots in certain managerial and advisory roles - but as we all know, being a good pilot doesn't necessarily make you a good manager (or vice-versa!).

What I've noticed of late is that many younger pilots recognise the fact that the job is (to borrow a phrase) 'highly automated, semi skilled and really not that hard', and tool themselves with other qualifications that will hopefully allow them to contribute to the airline outside of the flight deck.