Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [94]
Qantas is full of staff who reminisce about the good old days because the future does not look so bright. They are worried about what will happen tomorrow – not just to their jobs, but to the people who have trusted them with their lives. A huge number of ‘minor’ aircraft malfunctions have occurred within the Qantas fleet just in the last two years. These are maintenance-related issues. Qantas argues that this is normal for any airline and has been highlighted because of media attention. That media attention has been intense because Qantas planes have suffered from major mid-air incidents such as the exploding oxygen bottle that resulted in the emergency landing in Manila. Qantas has been lucky. What if that oxygen bottle had exploded on one of the Qantas charters that fly over the Antarctic? There are no handy landing strips there. The point was underscored in September 2009 when the same plane developed a fuel leak on a flight from Singapore to Sydney. The crew shut down one of the jet’s four engines and the plane, with 290 passengers on board, was diverted to Perth. It took engineers two and a half hours to check the engine and declare the plane safe.
Qantas management does not like the attention on these ‘minor’ maintenance issues. In the Dixon era, it seemed to fail to realise the harm its cost-cutting ways were doing to the public perception of the airline and to staff morale. With such a big workforce it is not hard to find people who work for Qantas in Australia. But it is very difficult to find one who is happy. And passengers, faced with yet another flight on an ageing or poorly maintained plane with a broken entertainment system, wonder what else has not been fixed properly.
Qantas founder Hudson Fysh wrote a pamphlet called ‘Ethics and Other Things’, which he distributed to senior staff in 1938. It was updated in 1948 and reproduced as a booklet and distributed to a select Qantas circle in 1955. It set out the airline founder’s personal views on loyalty, staff, diplomacy and, above all, service. It would have made interesting reading for the Qantas board and management team that was considering the $11 billion private equity buyout. ‘It may be maintained that duty towards our shareholders comes before our duty to the public. I maintain that duty to the public comes first, in that, if we are unable to provide that “worthy service”, it is doubtful if we should be in business,’ wrote Fysh.10
Sir Hudson Fysh’s only son, John, now 83 and living on the Central Coast, spent 30 years working for Qantas after leaving the air force as a ‘half-trained’ pilot. He went into the administrative side of the business because poor eyesight ruled him out of commercial flying. ‘My father always thought of Qantas as a noble endeavour. After he left it became more bureaucratic and then, with the amalgamation of TAA and once the blue tails came in, it became much more of a business.’
Fysh said the decision to try to sell the airline to APA as part of a leveraged buyout was the nadir.
The recent years of executives rewarding themselves with large salaries, and looking to sell Qantas off, was a long way from my father’s beliefs. They did it just to make money, that’s all. Any question of noble endeavour was laughable. I thought [the buyout] was wrong in principle and was absolutely delighted when it failed. If people noticed the ground shaking in Dural at the time, it was my father turning in his grave. Many, many people were relieved when it didn’t go through. Not for emotional reasons, but because the national carrier was in danger.
Fysh added that he was relieved the airline was back in the hands of a chief executive with kerosene in his nostrils. ‘I have seen tough economic times, where there is over-capacity in the market, and it requires a bit of managing through. Alan Joyce may be the man to do it.’ 11
Hudson Fysh also