This thread displays the sort of bottom feeding vermin that write authoritatively without any form of knowledge or valid information but just to incite others. Quite a few posts on here have zero substance.

An article in The Australian claims that there will be at least 4 times the rate of suicides in Australia for at least the next 5 years due to the effects Coronavirus. For the first time, I wish that people on here posting propaganda and essentially just writing rubbish to mislead others could be prosecuted to the fullest extent off the laws. You deserve it - because the cr@p being posted is going to cause someone to tip over the edge. You are never going to know about it directly, and will continue on your smug, bullsh$#ing ways, but in the background that is what you will have left in your path.

And no, I'm not feeling unstable. But I have spoken to a few colleagues who are, and it became quickly apparent that a source of their increased anxiety was reading these threads. Thankfully I've managed to convince them to not come here for information because it has proven over and over again to be the least valid source of that.

But it has proven the greatest source of angst and bs in aviation. By little people, pretending to be all-knowing big people.

With respect, if you’re that close to the edge, might I suggest seeing a professional and don’t come here. This is a rumour network. By definition it is supposed to be full of crap. What is it with the new generation of sooks on here telling everyone else what they can and cannot write, because some snowflake might get their knickers in a twist? Grow up, and seek help.

It's not the new generation, its the old one. :rolleyes:

Your comments merely prove the point and demonstrate how completely clueless you are about mental health issues. :ugh::ugh:

I think post Covid the direct flights will be in demand.
A good start would be a hub out of Darwin direct to the UK and Europe with Current 787s.
Im sure Qantas could invest in the infrastructure required in Darwin and purchase a large share if not 50% in the Airport so at least some of the fees go back to QF group, unlike the debacle in Perth.
We need to learn from the Covid Crisis that keeping as much as possible in Australia is the best thing we can do for Jobs and Australia, time to forgo some of the greedy penny pinching for sky-high profits at the expense of Australia.
Im not sure of the technical nature of the possible payloads from DRW to LHR though .

Asturias 56 - I didn't make those comments lightly.

Various studies (many published) are categorical about CV mutating. It would be bizarre for it not to!
As for the virus being the product of a Wuhan Lab, whilst there isn't (yet) a smoking gun, it is vey, very likely that it was a military virus - and that is bad for number of reasons.
1) Ground Zero was Wuhan - the 35th largest city in China - 11,000,000 people.
2) Wuhan is the location of the main Chinese Military bio weapons lab.
3) The Chinese have never specifically said who patient zero is.
4) The story is a wet market - selling christ knows what but I would describe all such things as evil.
5) As near as the Chinese have come to a patient zero that person never actually visited the wet market.
6) The DNA sequence released by the Chinese apparently has sequences that don't appear in nature. Mutations are always possible, but what are the odds of a mutation vs genetic engineering?
7) The head of the Wuhan Lab spent ten years working at the University of North Carolina working on Corona virus sequencing. That person left UNC to become head of the Wuhan Bio Weapons Lab.
8) The Chinese are highly defensive on anything to do with this and are publicly alleging that the US released the virus in Wuhan - co-incidentally the very same city as their own bio weapons lab?

Do these facts 'prove' the virus came from a weapons lab? Not quite, but what are the odds of ALL those being true and the virus NOT being an escaped military virus? It's highly unlikely.

Where it's come from now is irrelevant really, except that business is unlikely to recover properly until there is a vaccine and if it is a military virus a vaccine will be a lot harder and more time consuming to arrive at. Airlines, particularly, are at the very front of the front lines of this and it is not going to be a pretty picture for a long time to come.

Don't be so selfish about this either. Think of Alan. Alan must be absolutely beside himself having to borrow money without handing most of it out to himself!

V-jet...did you get these points from the Epoch Times film? Did you notice it was *heavily* edited. Whoever they interviewed was cut every few seconds, they could have said the opposite to what came out in the film.

A sample from France from December tested positive to the virus, they hadn’t travelled. So many unknowns...

Sprite - no, I haven't seen any film from anyone on batflu, but yes for the unknowns. Including we don't know exactly how the thing is spread. It would be hard to say for certain (impossible) that anyone who had this thing in December (or earlier) hadn't opened a parcel containing something from Wuhan.

Only one 'known' is relevant.

We know we don't have a vaccine. No vaccine = at best a very limited travel/tourism/hospitality industry.

Bunch of French military were in Wuhan in October. Many of them report being sick when they returned home. That is currently being investigated as to whether it was COVID.

Yeah, good one.

The trouble with people on the edge is that they don’t realise how close they are. Be kind.

I hate to thread drift away from the topic but that theory has to be debunked.

SARS-COV-2 is NOT a bioengineered weapon so say the following scientific sources:

The virus evolved naturally and has zero hallmarks of human manipulation or laboratory engineering.
The Wuhan Lab (a civilian, not a military facility) has been praised by fellow scientists as world class and it's lead virologist is considered a global expert in the study of corona viruses.
Multiple Public Health Scientists have praised the work of the lab and their transparency in sharing information.

It doesn’t have to be bio-engineered to still have escaped from a lab. More likely though it’s mutated it’s way from a more benign disease to this currently more deadly one.

Dr dre. - I take your point but I think ‘debunked’ might be too strong a term.

Basically, I hope it’s completely innocent and the Chinese are victims of this, but I suspect that’s not the case.

Whether Xi, Kim or Blofeld concocted this or not, really is largely irrelevant. It has all the hallmarks of a military style ‘weapon’ and has literally stopped the (western) world in it’s collective tracks.

If it’s genuinely natural it will probably be easier to fight.

If it’s a military weapon or similarly created virus it will probably be very much harder to fight.

Until there is a vaccine the travel and hospitality sectors of the world economy are on life support.

This shows no sign of lessening it’s impact and anecdotal evidence suggests that this thing is just warming up in the US.

As of last week there were 30 MILLION Americans out of work. These figures are incomprehensible. Aside from the drain on the public purse, from Pilots perspectives that’s 30MILLION likely not spending (forget travelling) for Thanksgiving, Christmas of course far worse - that’s international, Europe looks like Depression ++ so far (and that worked out well last time!) Aussies not going to Europe, it’s staggering. Not postponed spending either, but cancelled.

We’ve got Depression Era unemployed but we did it in 4 weeks, not 4 years. Jobs lost, but also money lost - evaporated, never to be seen again.

My main point is the only way out is a vaccine. Tested and manufactured in enough quantities to be meaningful. Until that happens there will be little to base a future on.

I find criticism of the QF fleet a bit funny at the moment. I work there and for years I have complained about their underinvestment in mainline aircraft but ironically right now it is probably the company’s saving grace.

If they had spent $5-10B on a new international fleet that is sitting grounded for 12-24 months then the balance sheet would be looking pretty ugly right now.

It used to frustrate me no end that with the 787 fleet they would drip-feed the firm orders on a year to year basis. However if we now had 35 firm orders on the books due over the next 3 years the accountants would be very worried and I’d be worried about my job.

With fuel prices through the floor the existing fleet is still competitive and the refurbished A330’s have the same product (love it or hate it) as the newest ‘Dreamliners’.

So while I’d love to be flying the latest and greatest fleet and have dozens of new aircraft arriving each year, in this new reality we find ourselves in it’s lucky that’s not the case. Not good management, more dumb luck.

Even more staggering to me is that I have to grudgingly agree with BB above. Truly appalling management and business acumen (as well as jobseeker) really seems to have worked in Qf’s favour.

I still loathe the little vermin though...

Or it could be good management. QF survived the Asian financial meltdown in the mid 90's, They then coped with 9/11, SARS the GFC and now this. It could very well be the case that the reason they did drip feed aircraft orders is they were aware of the effects of sudden downturns and its effect on the bottom line. That they were very quickly able to convert assets in to cash suggests they had a "black swan event" business plan ready to go.

shame about all the buy backs eh

Are moderators going to continue to put up with this clown or is mindless invective now the standard on Pprune ?
Given the circumstances I don’t think that would be smart.

So, Beer Baron, I noticed in your post #45 you mentioned ":crickets "...I think I know wot you mean, but, would you like to elaborate? I think Keg would know wot you mean also!?

I am not a management apologist and the level of corporate greed amongst the executive is appalling but I am sure events such as this (maybe not on this scale) are considered. Qantas has been around for 100 years so they must know something about how the global aviation market works.

Yeah, I grudgingly feel this is right. In addition to learning from those crises, it could also be that Joyce learnt from the massive orders he inherited - Qantas has spent years pushing back the last 8 A380s which have no obvious place on the route map, and cancelled 35 B787s which would have arrived right as QF was trying to deal with the ME3 taking over as the dominant hub-and-spoke operators. Qantas seems to be able to restructure the group A320/1neo order multiple times with little difficulty (which I presume they've been able to do, because they built flexibility into the contract), and has been able to pick up exactly as many 787s as it wants to fly key routes. Making massive bets on what the future will look like is inherently risky; giving yourself the flexibility to match the fleet to the times helps manage that risk - to me, that's good management.

The other part, that I think gets overlooked in the whole 'share buybacks' debate, is that QF has been buying the 787s outright, as well as paying back and extending its debt, which means it seems to have had pretty easy access to finance in this crisis.