Virgin Australia : 315 Million Loss - How long can they survive?
I've never heard the term specialist except in government departments like the ATO, etc. Yes, GM Customer Journey, what a load of old cobblers. I reckon I know who should go first... the so-called 'People Team'... an over bloated group of control freaks that take millennia to make decisions, dictate every single dot point and full stop of every letter ever written and at least under the previous leader had most management afraid to look sideways without consulting them... absolutely ZERO commercial savvy and the BS-management-speak central distribution centre of the entire outfit. Glorified name for the 'Human Remains' department. There's probably several million saved right there.
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The first out the door should be the HR department. Considering all the BS candidates are subjected to during the recruitment process at considerable expense, it would seem all of that nonsense has failed to secure the best fit to manage this company. Fail.
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Sooo true, watch it lose money until all the major EBA's are signed for no increase, then a miraculous turn around
What's worse is that from what I'm told, they've all arrived with some HR degree but not one day of experience or understanding of (some would say even the capacity to develop an understanding of) the airline business or the special circumstances that shift and operational and/or crew operate in.
Hah, tell me about it. Telling them to stick their offer up their ass was a fabulous experience. Having interviewed for and been accepted by every major in the country, that lot were by far the worst to deal with during the interview process.
how many "majors" are in the country?
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New guy comes in, clears the decks in the hope of setting himself up for a stellar future.
Standard CEO performance.
My only surprise is that, given Scurrah’s predecessors performance, he didn’t clear more of the decks.
750 staff is less than 10%. AJ cleared more than that in 2013 and that was from a profitable company.
Was he handed a hospital pass - possibly, but its a public company so caveat emptor. Surely he is smart enough to figure that out.
I forsee a period of pain and anguish for staff and shareholders alike.
Good Luck!
Standard CEO performance.
My only surprise is that, given Scurrah’s predecessors performance, he didn’t clear more of the decks.
750 staff is less than 10%. AJ cleared more than that in 2013 and that was from a profitable company.
Was he handed a hospital pass - possibly, but its a public company so caveat emptor. Surely he is smart enough to figure that out.
I forsee a period of pain and anguish for staff and shareholders alike.
Good Luck!
If I were Delta, I'd step in and offer to put the owners out of their misery and offer a low price for the whole outfit. I'd insist it were NOT on a transmission of business basis so that I could throw away anything of no value and just keep the core... Order a bunch of decals for temporary application to the remaining aircraft and then re-employ those I wanted on new conditions. Re-brand the whole thing Delta Australia, keep the colours for cheaper transition and get rid of the archaic reservations system and deploy Delta's IT platform, offshore all the maintenance to the United States to Delta's technical division other than daily maintenance and get rid of every aeroplane that doesn't exist in the parent DL fleet already. LAX would be gone, absorbed into DL, HKG gone, a fleet of 737-800s and get rid of Tiger, just merge any part of value into mainline. Contract out everything except for front line supervision, back office, etc. Load Control as it would presumably now be in the Delta system could be done remotely from Atlanta. Reservations similarly could be done by a combination of res office here and out of hours switched through to the USA (just like QF did with Tulsa and Hammersmith in the 80s and 90s).
I'm no big fan of the Americans as a nation at the moment, but their companies know how to clean a place out and re-set the priorities to making money, particularly in somewhere like Oz where they only have one major competitor.
I'm no big fan of the Americans as a nation at the moment, but their companies know how to clean a place out and re-set the priorities to making money, particularly in somewhere like Oz where they only have one major competitor.
If I were Delta, I'd step in and offer to put the owners out of their misery and offer a low price for the whole outfit. I'd insist it were NOT on a transmission of business basis so that I could throw away anything of no value and just keep the core... Order a bunch of decals for temporary application to the remaining aircraft and then re-employ those I wanted on new conditions. Re-brand the whole thing Delta Australia, keep the colours for cheaper transition and get rid of the archaic reservations system and deploy Delta's IT platform, offshore all the maintenance to the United States to Delta's technical division other than daily maintenance and get rid of every aeroplane that doesn't exist in the parent DL fleet already. LAX would be gone, absorbed into DL, HKG gone, a fleet of 737-800s and get rid of Tiger, just merge any part of value into mainline. Contract out everything except for front line supervision, back office, etc. Load Control as it would presumably now be in the Delta system could be done remotely from Atlanta. Reservations similarly could be done by a combination of res office here and out of hours switched through to the USA (just like QF did with Tulsa and Hammersmith in the 80s and 90s).
I'm no big fan of the Americans as a nation at the moment, but their companies know how to clean a place out and re-set the priorities to making money, particularly in somewhere like Oz where they only have one major competitor.
I'm no big fan of the Americans as a nation at the moment, but their companies know how to clean a place out and re-set the priorities to making money, particularly in somewhere like Oz where they only have one major competitor.
Quite a number of interesting things came out of yesterday’s announcement.....
Firstly, people here probably should show a little more empathy to the fact that 750 people will be losing their jobs over the next 12 months. That will certainly be tough on the families that are involved. 750 jobs may only represent 7.5% of the workforce - but the fact is that is a significant number or head office staff. I personally don’t know how cutting those 750 jobs won’t have an impact on day to day operations of the airline. Will flight planners, load controllers, crew controllers, rostering staff be safe? And how will this affect things like the PBS and already problematic rosters that have the troops up and about? Having said all of that - there is definitely a glut of staff in the Village and in the other ‘Head Office’ overlooking Circular Quay.
It is good to see PS making the hard decisions - they certainly need to be made to ensure that this place survives. However there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture at Virgin and this relates to operational staff as well as the office staff. Some examples:
- Single runway operations in Sydney last week, 5 paxing cabin crew but no CS due to disrupt. Not one single cabin crew was happy to act up as CS - flight cancelled and 170 people now stuck in Sydney.
- A ludicrous situation where cabin crew can’t operate a MEL PER MEL return. I’m sick and tired of heading to PH and whilst I sit around for 2 hours before coming home, that all of the cabin crew get off or go to the hotel. Or the even more stupid case of the return operating cabin crew paxing over, and the operating cabin crew over paxing home.
- VA has training managers for every fleet. It has standards managers for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees the training managers and standards managers. It has a fleet manager for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees all the fleet managers. It has base managers in every base. It has a manager to oversee the base managers. It has a manager to oversee all the EBAs. And it finally has a GMFO who oversees all the managers who oversee the managers. (Confused yet?). When a Standards Manager of a fleet of 5 or 6 aeroplanes is on Check Captain pay plus 20% (give or take) one has to wonder if those roles are safe in this right sizing. One also has to wonder why when you have all these managers in training and standard, why you have Training FOs and Check and Training Captains writing sim profiles on admin days?
- You have the situation where managers aren’t using the staff car park and instead use Short Term car parks at a cost of I’d suggest $5k a year.
- This one I might cop some stick for - but when Sydney goes down to one runway, that is not the Company’s fault. When you hear multiple crews getting on to AMCO and telling them to tell crewing that they won’t be extending, you have to wonder. Now sometimes crew are legitimately tired, and they should get off the aircraft no questions asked. But when people decide at the start of the day before it all turns to crap that they won’t be extending, then perhaps that’s part of the culture issue too. Who does the ‘screw the company’ attitude really hurt? Ultimately every time you put a limit on FDPs in an EBA the Company will roster towards that. People forget that those increased FDPs were as a result of getting 23 days off in 56.
- There is a CHC base of over 50 pilots despite their only being 1-2 departures a day from that port.
Those are just some of the cultural and systemic issues surrounding this place. Unfortunately I think the pilots have become immune to this place losing money hand over fist - and that’s a problem. The new CEO has a massive task ahead of him, I hope for the sake of a lot of guys and girls careers, and the subsequent effect on families, that he gets it right.
Firstly, people here probably should show a little more empathy to the fact that 750 people will be losing their jobs over the next 12 months. That will certainly be tough on the families that are involved. 750 jobs may only represent 7.5% of the workforce - but the fact is that is a significant number or head office staff. I personally don’t know how cutting those 750 jobs won’t have an impact on day to day operations of the airline. Will flight planners, load controllers, crew controllers, rostering staff be safe? And how will this affect things like the PBS and already problematic rosters that have the troops up and about? Having said all of that - there is definitely a glut of staff in the Village and in the other ‘Head Office’ overlooking Circular Quay.
It is good to see PS making the hard decisions - they certainly need to be made to ensure that this place survives. However there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture at Virgin and this relates to operational staff as well as the office staff. Some examples:
- Single runway operations in Sydney last week, 5 paxing cabin crew but no CS due to disrupt. Not one single cabin crew was happy to act up as CS - flight cancelled and 170 people now stuck in Sydney.
- A ludicrous situation where cabin crew can’t operate a MEL PER MEL return. I’m sick and tired of heading to PH and whilst I sit around for 2 hours before coming home, that all of the cabin crew get off or go to the hotel. Or the even more stupid case of the return operating cabin crew paxing over, and the operating cabin crew over paxing home.
- VA has training managers for every fleet. It has standards managers for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees the training managers and standards managers. It has a fleet manager for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees all the fleet managers. It has base managers in every base. It has a manager to oversee the base managers. It has a manager to oversee all the EBAs. And it finally has a GMFO who oversees all the managers who oversee the managers. (Confused yet?). When a Standards Manager of a fleet of 5 or 6 aeroplanes is on Check Captain pay plus 20% (give or take) one has to wonder if those roles are safe in this right sizing. One also has to wonder why when you have all these managers in training and standard, why you have Training FOs and Check and Training Captains writing sim profiles on admin days?
- You have the situation where managers aren’t using the staff car park and instead use Short Term car parks at a cost of I’d suggest $5k a year.
- This one I might cop some stick for - but when Sydney goes down to one runway, that is not the Company’s fault. When you hear multiple crews getting on to AMCO and telling them to tell crewing that they won’t be extending, you have to wonder. Now sometimes crew are legitimately tired, and they should get off the aircraft no questions asked. But when people decide at the start of the day before it all turns to crap that they won’t be extending, then perhaps that’s part of the culture issue too. Who does the ‘screw the company’ attitude really hurt? Ultimately every time you put a limit on FDPs in an EBA the Company will roster towards that. People forget that those increased FDPs were as a result of getting 23 days off in 56.
- There is a CHC base of over 50 pilots despite their only being 1-2 departures a day from that port.
Those are just some of the cultural and systemic issues surrounding this place. Unfortunately I think the pilots have become immune to this place losing money hand over fist - and that’s a problem. The new CEO has a massive task ahead of him, I hope for the sake of a lot of guys and girls careers, and the subsequent effect on families, that he gets it right.
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Quite a number of interesting things came out of yesterday’s announcement.....
Firstly, people here probably should show a little more empathy to the fact that 750 people will be losing their jobs over the next 12 months. That will certainly be tough on the families that are involved. 750 jobs may only represent 7.5% of the workforce - but the fact is that is a significant number or head office staff. I personally don’t know how cutting those 750 jobs won’t have an impact on day to day operations of the airline. Will flight planners, load controllers, crew controllers, rostering staff be safe? And how will this affect things like the PBS and already problematic rosters that have the troops up and about? Having said all of that - there is definitely a glut of staff in the Village and in the other ‘Head Office’ overlooking Circular Quay.
It is good to see PS making the hard decisions - they certainly need to be made to ensure that this place survives. However there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture at Virgin and this relates to operational staff as well as the office staff. Some examples:
- Single runway operations in Sydney last week, 5 paxing cabin crew but no CS due to disrupt. Not one single cabin crew was happy to act up as CS - flight cancelled and 170 people now stuck in Sydney.
- A ludicrous situation where cabin crew can’t operate a MEL PER MEL return. I’m sick and tired of heading to PH and whilst I sit around for 2 hours before coming home, that all of the cabin crew get off or go to the hotel. Or the even more stupid case of the return operating cabin crew paxing over, and the operating cabin crew over paxing home.
- VA has training managers for every fleet. It has standards managers for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees the training managers and standards managers. It has a fleet manager for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees all the fleet managers. It has base managers in every base. It has a manager to oversee the base managers. It has a manager to oversee all the EBAs. And it finally has a GMFO who oversees all the managers who oversee the managers. (Confused yet?). When a Standards Manager of a fleet of 5 or 6 aeroplanes is on Check Captain pay plus 20% (give or take) one has to wonder if those roles are safe in this right sizing. One also has to wonder why when you have all these managers in training and standard, why you have Training FOs and Check and Training Captains writing sim profiles on admin days?
- You have the situation where managers aren’t using the staff car park and instead use Short Term car parks at a cost of I’d suggest $5k a year.
- This one I might cop some stick for - but when Sydney goes down to one runway, that is not the Company’s fault. When you hear multiple crews getting on to AMCO and telling them to tell crewing that they won’t be extending, you have to wonder. Now sometimes crew are legitimately tired, and they should get off the aircraft no questions asked. But when people decide at the start of the day before it all turns to crap that they won’t be extending, then perhaps that’s part of the culture issue too. Who does the ‘screw the company’ attitude really hurt? Ultimately every time you put a limit on FDPs in an EBA the Company will roster towards that. People forget that those increased FDPs were as a result of getting 23 days off in 56.
- There is a CHC base of over 50 pilots despite their only being 1-2 departures a day from that port.
Those are just some of the cultural and systemic issues surrounding this place. Unfortunately I think the pilots have become immune to this place losing money hand over fist - and that’s a problem. The new CEO has a massive task ahead of him, I hope for the sake of a lot of guys and girls careers, and the subsequent effect on families, that he gets it right.
Firstly, people here probably should show a little more empathy to the fact that 750 people will be losing their jobs over the next 12 months. That will certainly be tough on the families that are involved. 750 jobs may only represent 7.5% of the workforce - but the fact is that is a significant number or head office staff. I personally don’t know how cutting those 750 jobs won’t have an impact on day to day operations of the airline. Will flight planners, load controllers, crew controllers, rostering staff be safe? And how will this affect things like the PBS and already problematic rosters that have the troops up and about? Having said all of that - there is definitely a glut of staff in the Village and in the other ‘Head Office’ overlooking Circular Quay.
It is good to see PS making the hard decisions - they certainly need to be made to ensure that this place survives. However there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture at Virgin and this relates to operational staff as well as the office staff. Some examples:
- Single runway operations in Sydney last week, 5 paxing cabin crew but no CS due to disrupt. Not one single cabin crew was happy to act up as CS - flight cancelled and 170 people now stuck in Sydney.
- A ludicrous situation where cabin crew can’t operate a MEL PER MEL return. I’m sick and tired of heading to PH and whilst I sit around for 2 hours before coming home, that all of the cabin crew get off or go to the hotel. Or the even more stupid case of the return operating cabin crew paxing over, and the operating cabin crew over paxing home.
- VA has training managers for every fleet. It has standards managers for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees the training managers and standards managers. It has a fleet manager for every fleet. It has a manager who oversees all the fleet managers. It has base managers in every base. It has a manager to oversee the base managers. It has a manager to oversee all the EBAs. And it finally has a GMFO who oversees all the managers who oversee the managers. (Confused yet?). When a Standards Manager of a fleet of 5 or 6 aeroplanes is on Check Captain pay plus 20% (give or take) one has to wonder if those roles are safe in this right sizing. One also has to wonder why when you have all these managers in training and standard, why you have Training FOs and Check and Training Captains writing sim profiles on admin days?
- You have the situation where managers aren’t using the staff car park and instead use Short Term car parks at a cost of I’d suggest $5k a year.
- This one I might cop some stick for - but when Sydney goes down to one runway, that is not the Company’s fault. When you hear multiple crews getting on to AMCO and telling them to tell crewing that they won’t be extending, you have to wonder. Now sometimes crew are legitimately tired, and they should get off the aircraft no questions asked. But when people decide at the start of the day before it all turns to crap that they won’t be extending, then perhaps that’s part of the culture issue too. Who does the ‘screw the company’ attitude really hurt? Ultimately every time you put a limit on FDPs in an EBA the Company will roster towards that. People forget that those increased FDPs were as a result of getting 23 days off in 56.
- There is a CHC base of over 50 pilots despite their only being 1-2 departures a day from that port.
Those are just some of the cultural and systemic issues surrounding this place. Unfortunately I think the pilots have become immune to this place losing money hand over fist - and that’s a problem. The new CEO has a massive task ahead of him, I hope for the sake of a lot of guys and girls careers, and the subsequent effect on families, that he gets it right.
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Unfortunately when they quote international performance that includes all international flying. VANZ, VAI 737, A330 and B777. VANZ, VAI 737 and the A330 are nothing more then a boat anchor. Shutdown the VAI 737 operation, merge VANZ into VAA and get rid of those A330's.
Even Qantas people were crying in their beer that they had got the wrong bloke.
So if he had got the job you ask? My guess Qantas would be in much the same place as it is now and so would Virgin unless they didn't try to take on Qantas full on. Virgin just does not have the economy of scale Qantas does which really hurts when things get tough.
Virgin started out as a low cost carrier and came close to going under, only being saved by the demise of Ansett. It then rapidly ramped up to fill the void, changed to a full service airline, and is now looking like Ansett did before the collapse. An unnecessary mix of aircraft types, bloated office structure, unprofitable routes and a series of "why on earth did they do that ? " decisions have all added up.
With the benefit of hindsight, they would probably have been better of had they stuck to the low cost formulae of one aircraft type and strict cost control. Qantas would have let them have 1/3 of the domestic market and everyone would have been happy. Customers would have been able to choose between a premium carrier or an Australian version of Southwest Air, with the appropriate price differential.
With the benefit of hindsight, they would probably have been better of had they stuck to the low cost formulae of one aircraft type and strict cost control. Qantas would have let them have 1/3 of the domestic market and everyone would have been happy. Customers would have been able to choose between a premium carrier or an Australian version of Southwest Air, with the appropriate price differential.
