Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [59]
The Offset Alpine saga continued to roll on for years with the pursuit, trial and eventual jailing of Rivkin’s driver, Gordon Wood, for the murder of his girlfriend, Caroline Byrne. She was thrown off The Gap in Sydney for knowing too much about the Offset Alpine deal. Rivkin committed suicide in 2005 and as recently as 2008 Kennedy was hit with a multi-million-dollar tax bill by the Australian Taxation Office for his part in the scandal.
Virgin Blue continued to go from strength to strength, cutting down to 60 per cent Qantas’s 90 per cent share of the domestic market it had at the time Ansett failed. Qantas needed to compete without damaging its premier brand and alienating its all-important business clients, who paid a premium to sit at the pointy end of the plane at short notice. An attempt to put all economy jets on certain routes had back-fired, with passengers angrily complaining at the lack of their customary luxury perks. The solution was a budget carrier. But other airlines, including Qantas partner British Airways, had tried to launch low-cost options and failed spectacularly. British Airways’ Australian-born boss Sir Rod Eddington, formerly executive chairman of Ansett, said he knew British Airway’s Go Fly budget brand was not going to work when he heard the chief executive of Go talking on the radio about the routes she intended to target. They were all British Airways’ most profitable routes and British Airways had no way of stopping her. British Airways sold Go Fly in 2001 after just three years of the botched experiment.
Geoff Dixon needed to make a Qantas low-budget airline work by learning from the mistakes made elsewhere. He needed someone with previous experience who understood the problem. Fortunately for him he already had that man on the staff, hired from the ashes of Ansett. Dixon had given him a job in 2000 in the route-planning department on the recommendation of Eddington. ‘I thought he was terrific,’ Eddington told the Australian. ‘He was well respected and well liked at Ansett. He had very good analytical skills. He was very knowledgeable and he had his ego under control – which is important.’8
The man was Alan Joyce, who would go on to be Dixon’s successor. Joyce recalled his interview at the Qantas Melbourne office: ‘Geoff interviewed me, with his feet on the table, for about fifteen minutes.’9 He got the job. Geoff Dixon was an unusually decisive man.
Irish-born Joyce was perfect for the role. Born in 1966, the first of four highly successful siblings, he achieved a double major in physics and mathematics and a masters in management science at Trinity College, Dublin. His father worked as a postman and in a cigarette factory and his mother as a cleaner at a sports centre to help put their four children through university. He first went into computer programming before joining Irish national airline Aer Lingus as an operations research analyst. ‘It was the job that attracted me rather than the airline, [but] I got kerosene in my nostrils,’ he told the Australian.10 He actually wanted to be a pilot but his eyesight wasn’t good enough. Instead he was tasked with coming up with finding a way to meet the threat of Ryanair, which Michael O’Leary had turned into the pin-up hero of cut-price airlines the world over. Joyce’s detailed analysis of the sector came to nothing then, but it was the perfect foundation when, years later at Qantas, Geoff Dixon called him in to look at how a low-cost carrier could be set up to match Virgin Blue.
Joyce already knew what not to do. ‘There were two types of failures. The ones that compromised on cost base and ended up not having the advantage to compete against the others. Ted [United Airlines] and Song [Delta Airlines] and a lot of the American carriers fall into that category. They were too expensive,’ said Joyce.11 ‘On the other side were the Go-type airlines, which got the cost base down but