The airline according to an insider has been skipping its scheduled maintenance and service, rescheduling it at greater intervals between fixes and relying on the longest period an aircraft may fly without maintenance theories.
It appears that Qantas has been doing what Ansett had done prior to its collapse. They have both become willing victims of privatisation and foreign ownership. Each of these two airlines had their budgets lowered creating profits for shareholders to see. They lowered their budgets.
Qantas in the 1980's used to report profits from sales of surplus aircraft when their operations could not provide them with the required operating profits.
Qantas has a culture that continues to rely on government hand outs through being a preferred carrier, idiots in the sporting and other public sectors blindly being Qantas groupies whilst the airline spend obscene amounts on dumb pop stars to promote the airline to a world not interested in Olivia Newton John and John Travolta other than in their respective jobs as entertainers.
Singapore has the ideal model for privatisaiton. Unfortunately we believe (without expressly saying so) they cannot be relied on because their eyes are different to ours. So we slavishly adhere to irrelavant Harvard Uni Harvard MBA models and pay exorbitant fees and wages to consultants and board members and slash and burn at any cost as long as the bottom line points upwards.
The airline should have been thoroughly audited at the time of the failed coup last year. No one has told us whether Dixon, Jackson and Co returned their large fees for the fiasco or whether those fees were conditional upon the deal going through completely. Being a banker myself and an economist, I would suggest the "break fee" applicable to their remuneration would have been triggered before the event collapsed.
Whats the point you ask? they have mismanaged the airline and continue to do so. A spot audit if thorough will uncover what a lot of people within the airline have been saying for a while. The problem here is that they have been using the same tactics the late Sir Peter Ables and his erstwhile mate Rocky did all those years back. They buy over the head honchos of the unions with promises of executive jobs when they leave the unions if they keep everything under control when in charge of the union so as not to embarass the airline and its managers.
Qantas need not make a profit. It should become a public carrier owned by the public (that being government) for the public. Governments should not be in the business of making profits where hospitals, transport, education, utilities are concerned. We have all seen what Ziggy did to Telstra, losing billions in fictitious deals, what we did in selling Optus to Singapore who outsourced most of its jobs, what Kenneth did in privatising electricty and water like the other dumb fools in government then using a most convenient selective measure of efficiency to justify what they did.
As for Qantas it long called the UK Home. It runs as tardily as British airways does.
