Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [38]
As recession loomed, Qantas reported a loss of $19.5 million in the 1981 financial year. Hamilton sold off the new Qantas Centre, its holdings in the Wentworth Hotel and property in San Francisco to restore the balance sheet. Qantas also cut airfares by up to $200 to ‘fly its way out’ of the recession.10 Even so, the 1982–83 financial year saw a loss of $34.4 million and a cut in staff numbers of 1,000.
Hamilton died suddenly at home in 1984 but had set Qantas on course to become what chairman Jim Leslie described as ‘a leaner, tougher and smarter airline’.11 The following year, under Chief Executive Ron Yates, Qantas introduced Boeing 767s and began the process that would eventually lead to privatisation.
One of the reasons Qantas gave for the financial loss of the early 1980s was an industrial dispute over the crewing levels of the Boeing 747SP, the shorter special performance version of the 747, designed to carry fewer passengers than the standard jumbo. Over the decades Qantas had struggled with its employees over pay and staffing levels. In the 1960s old hands such as the airline’s founder Hudson Fysh clashed with a new breed of executives, particularly over the issue of pilot pay. Qantas pilots were meeting their well-heeled American counterparts in luxury hotels on stopovers all over the world and wondering why they did not get paid as much money for flying exactly the same planes. Across the globe other pilots were feeling the same way. Even some of the American pilots felt hard done by. BOAC, Pan American and Eastern Airlines pilots decided to take industrial action. Fysh said: ‘We thought in our false pride [Qantas] was different, and it just could not happen to us.’12 But this was not the case.
In April 1957 Qantas pilots went out on strike for nine days, with navigators and flight engineers going out in sympathy. Little was resolved. In February 1964 the pilots went out again for three days. Fysh was dismayed. ‘These differences with the pilots caused me much anguish of mind, especially as I felt that I was one of a small group of us who understood the pilot’s position; but I was frustrated and unable to do anything about it. I was accused of favouring the pilots in the critical early days of the first strike when I felt future trouble might have been avoided,’ he wrote in the third of his memoirs chronicling his 46 years with Qantas.13
Even his patience became exhausted when the pilots went out for 28 days in November 1966. ‘This strike took place after my retirement, and resulted in a disastrous loss of revenue to the company and also to its pilots.’14 The new executives did not like the fact that the pilots were so well paid. Fysh said: ‘One of the mainsprings of misunderstanding was the fact that senior pilots received a higher remuneration than many hard-working senior executives. This of course was a tradition from the old Air Force days, and so also was the fact that an air pilot was a man of great independence, a man who could not be ordered about as others could. In fact they were damn difficult, as I suppose I was.’15
Difficulties over the pilots and Fysh’s views about these heroes of the air made his last days at Qantas unhappy and unpleasant. The World War One aviator and bush pilot was reluctantly pushed into retirement in June 1966, leaving the airline he had built to a future in which bureaucrats would run it without any of that romantic nonsense about pilots being men of great independence who could not be ordered