Very true. I just think in light of the exceptional Management Team that has led us through the valley of death so many times in the last 10-15 years, Gareth -may- have been over reaching himself somewhat using the plural 'employees' instead of the soon-to-be far more likely 'employee'.

As for EK dealing with the Mascot lunatics.... Words are simply not enough, what cretin even thought their preschool thought bubbles could have worked? Someone came up with them, someone else thought they were worth supporting and then someone else (and the board) approved it... The whole cataclysmic disaster has been patently obvious to anyone with an IQ bigger than their shoe size for nigh on TEN YEARS!!

Expectations of further LOSSES?

It only gets tough in the market place when you know you are "behind the eight ball". That means that your competitors have the edge against you and a competent board, after due diligence, would activate a strategy in quick time to regain what was lost.
Understanding the factors that have gained you your greater share of the market than your competitors in the past is the starting point. Understanding your customers and WHY they like to fly with the airline is a KEY part of this.
It seems to have eluded this board exactly what those factors were, and a failed strategy ensued.

This not news to anyone, but the magnitude of the expected losses IS !

No hope of a recovery when Gareth Evans makes statements such as the quote above.

In line with expectations given a couple of credible excuses why the brilliant strategies articulated just months ago have been compromised. Events beyond our control, unforeseen circumstances etc etc.

I just read the entertaining book " The Psychopath Test". It reminds the reader that there are an above average number of defective individuals in senior business roles, and that one of their hallmark features is being unable to accept blame for the consequences of their actions. There are many more traits that would be all too familiar to we who read this thread in despair.

As the war of words between America and Russia hots up, how smart does sending all your maintenance and overhaul overseas and outside your immediate and direct local control look today?

Consolidation is the future! Start with your own airline you clown! One AOC, One Airline! Save a fortune!

I assume Virgin would be in alot of trouble then?

Not from anyone at Coward St.....

Not very... But it sure makes the decision to not buy Antonov, Ilyushin, Irkut, Sukhoi or Tupolev products look really smart. Always a positive in any crisis!

Strategy
 

It seems pretty simple to me.

By Shrinking QANTAS, and growing Jetstar they are reducing the liabilities of legacy airline conditions such as leave, superannuation,pay awards, over staffing, maintenance costs,infrastructure costs and probably a myriad of other things.
When Jetstar becomes a bigger airline than QANTAS ie if it gets to the point that Qantas is a quarter of the size of Jetstar. They could sell off say 75% to 90% of Jetstar which is the greater component at this stage of the QANTAS group and not beholden to the QANTAS sales act, essentially they will have bypassed the Qantas sales act and for the greater part got rid of 75% of their legacy conditions.
This is obviously a long term strategy which can only be accomplished over a long time, maybe a decade or two
The only problem with this strategy is that Jetstar is not making the projected profits and growth to financially accomplish this, and the danger and risk which is being realised is that the billion dollars that they have stashed away to support this strategy notwithstanding a shortage of income from Jetstar coupled with higher than expected set up costs and regulatory difficulties involved with launching Jetstar Japan and Hong Kong, plus fierce completion from Virgin are factors that are bleeding the group dry.
Consequently this high risk strategy may potentially bankrupt the whole QANTAS group.
They have rolled the dice and set the train in motion, and like any gamble or runaway train, the end result may by now be well and truly out of their hands.
Just a theory, which if close to the truth, probably seemed like a good plan at the time !

Brilliant post Collando, and on the money, Kudos! :D

They are gambling thousands of good people's jobs with a poor strategy and the board and management team will get away with it whether it works or not, in my view, corporate Australia is sick.

I have seen that kind of assessment written before. The question that always bubbles to the surface though is: why? If you were about to embark on a long game of reducing terms and conditions you could do it quicker and easier with dialogue (and a long-running propaganda game). The end result would be better, you would capture hearts and minds along the way and you'd still have an airline.

I'd wager that properly staged, without that asinine lock-out, most of Jetstar and the idiotic Asian sideshows, they could have had us on 10% less money for 10% more work by now. And a better fleet, and a billion & a half more in the bank and a credit rating and some credibility.

From my foxhole I am glad they didn't, but I despair for all of my junior colleagues caught out there in the open.

I still reckon the entire sorry spectacle has been performed by looters as Management Theatre, and the show has been underwritten by unwitting mums and dads courtesy of their retirement funds. The circle is completed by the fund managers whooping it up with Clifford and the boys in the Chairmans Lounge, first class cabins and wherever fine Rockpool grub is sold. It ain't their money on the line after all, but it is their butts in those swanky first class seats.

I will say this again. What I fail to understand is how Joyce still has a job. Everything he has suggested, pondered about or tried has failed. From Red Q to Jetstar Hong Kong.

But he is still there. So the board must think he is doing a wonderful job at destroying Qantas.

So the question we all want answered is why do they want to do this? Because the way I see it, they might not just take down Qantas, but the whole Qantas group.

I am not convinced that he is, in any significant way, still here.

I must say, he has been somewhat invisible of late.

SOPS.

AJ couldn't even get traction on his "personal threat" claims.

I believe there is a lot of posturing going on in the background.

Potential CEO's & or Chairmans are waiting for AJ to hit coffin corner first.

They don't want to get caught in AJ's self induced upset, they want to see the upset happen & then come in to initiate the recovery manoeuvre.

MC

Well yeah, they are keeping him in the cupboard until 28/8, after which he will have to suffer the ignominy of a $ ten million payout, then we will get Qantas CEO MK III. I note that Dick Headeth has been fronting all the communications lately.

Let's see who turns up to deliver the bad news when presenting the financial report.

Interesting, they are all coming out of the woodwork this week, with the exception of the little bloke.... I guess that's why he has so many CEO's these days, one Q domestic and one for Q Int (currently sharing the same AOC) I expect them to bob up in the next couple of days with their two cents worth to add to the confusion..

So JH, we just keep bleeding brand "Qantas" dry whilst we are waiting to turn a profit now that it is clear the LCC market is over cooked? Not sure that we have a "few years" to find out... :rolleyes:

WOW, great strategy, these guys will say anything, the media hook line and sinker again, oh that's right it was a CAPA organised event, say no more...:D

Of less import than many posts here the followup to my expectation of QANTAS QF1 recently was fulfilled and exceeded.

Departed on time, perfectly clean, no service issues - ran like a dream.

Changed to Emirates in Dubai and to be quite frank their performance levels have slipped markedly. Boarding was both late and relatively disorganised and the cabin crew were average at best. Constant confusion, it seemed like there was a grand total of 2 crew members who knew what they were doing and had to take the initiative to tell the others who were gormlessly hanging around what to do - and by that I mean things like "go and get a refill tray" followed by "keep serving the drinks from where you served the last person" after a trolley had run out of something.

Probably just a one off but certainly the QANTAS crew had it all over Emirates from a customer service perspective.

Actually, one thing EK did win on - CC uniforms. Exactly why QF staff are dressed like a trashy LCC I will never know. The Emirates crew uniform was far more polished.

Will see what happens on return journey.

Meanwhile... In the real world..

BRIEF-Qantas cancelled 5 Airbus jets in July, Latam 4 jets | Reuters

Austra

Hit the nail on the head. Sums up the reason of our entire dire financial situation.

Had it been their OWN business, their OWN money - they would never have spent it like gambling addicts in Vegas.

Its simple folks.
With the annual results due in under three weeks, the orchestrated play has begun in earnest to try and divert attention away from the real issue.

First diversion... The CFO throwing the idea up about somebody else buying in.Qantas predicts another airline will buy in now restrictions are looser

Olivia with this classic....Why the Qantas media team needs you
Is Qantas an airline to these people? Or some form of social experiment or political toy they like to run as the worst branch of labor/libs in the country?
And lets not forget Jetstar.....
http://centreforaviation.com/news/qa...oup-ceo-362572

And all of this within the last few days. Where's Alan btw?

It does make you wonder how poor the figures for QF would be if these people weren't at the helm.
To think they are about to deliver the worst figures in the company's history, never before achieved, with a reduced fleet and network for the mainline product. I wonder what their plan is to fix it. Blame others and sack others?

You guys are out to depress aren't you??

250 Qantas Angels..... I would so dearly want to think that is a joke, or even better, they were LAME's or Pilots (or anyone who might know how lift is formed) but that is priceless. The way to run an airline and defend it against appalling results is just so obvious... 'Qantas Angels'... Of course... I couldn't have come up with that in a million years!!

Ye gods!!

You could not make this stuff up.

I am contemplating living in a world with Qantas Angels. :ugh: it is a bleak prospect. Do they expect no one to see the attendant irony in having a reserve corps of people with whom to swamp social media to drown out critics? It is a ghastly development that only the most jaded propagandist would have embraced.

A pretty good way to quiet the critics is to actually provide a great product, which includes a rational fleet and a rational management.

Qantas Angels. Bah!

There are a couple of regulars who turn up in the comments section of 'Plane Talking' to defend Joyce every time Ben voices any criticism. Qantas Angels perhaps? Although it seems to be pretty much a full-time job, so maybe not.

Trying to control the opinions of fellow Australians using social media? I wonder if they even realize that the Australian public are smart enough to see through this bullcrap. Talk about control freaks.

:D

No.. They are absolutely totally incompetent. They ARE on a runaway train and have been so for 15 years. They cant control anything and are grasping at straws.

Total, disgraceful incompetence. Watching these idiots is like watching a Slo Mo train crash, knowing whats going to happen and having to watch it frame by frame for 15 YEARS...

It makes me sick..

It could have all been SO different...

You are paid to do a job - DO IT.. No training, No understanding... Why do I waste my breath...,


From behind the paywall of The Oz 11/8/14.

Carbon copy of QF....

So how much do the angels get paid compared to their boss??

Once we see the standard of their English we will be able to guess whether they are on-shore or off-shored. An off-shored social media Quangle protagonist should cost no more than $20 a week (it's part time). $20 x 250 = $5k weekly - cheaper than a single market one-off 30 second TV spot with the added advantage the great unwashed will struggle to determine whether a Quangle is a QF fanboi with an alternative viewpoint, or whether they are simply a company shill.

As a PR strategy, I hate to say, it's a master stroke. The internet is forever, so it provides lasting disinformation on a Goebbels-like scale, and cheap to boot!

Of course, if integrity is important to you, then sorry, it doesn't measure up.

good point MOA999

Of course she was around "obLivious" of the impact for getting the social media medium wrong... the "reason" why people started to fly with everyone else when they went banana's about pyjamas.... ...:rolleyes:

Qantas in new social media fail with #QantasLuxury hashtag backlash - mUmBRELLA



No idea..

Once the social media world gets wind of this strategy then Qantas will be branded as forever untrustworthy. I imagine that there are other cynical companies doing this too, which further saddens me.

The only reason to have 250 of these trolls is to outnumber the critics, each with a slightly unique writing style but the same message. Gaming the media that way is perfectly emblematic of our executive and management. Lets not fix the problem, lets talk over the critics so that they can't be heard. :mad:

Maybe social media and Olivia deserve each other. We sure as hell don't deserve her.

Already happened. According to the recent Readers Digest survey of most trusted Australian brands, Qantas, was nowhere to be seen.

Just very sad.

Presumably the "Qantas Angels" are bought with freebies, upgrades and lounge memberships like most politicians. Nothing so vulgar as cash.

Priceless!

250?
 

Clearly the 250 'angels' will be needed on 28/8 24/7 for a month of Sundays.

Probably already having regular choir practice.

I wonder what fiction they can produce from our award to blame the pilots this time, those naughty angels.

He's right on the money when he says this doesn't happen quickly, because first you must split long haul & short haul and create two AOC's before consolidating it all back to one :{