Joe Aston at 'AFR' would have to be one of Australia's best journalists, as he has legendary ability to cut through the BS.

The first part of today's 'AFR' missive is about how QAN mucked up its simulators in Sydney (selling off the land, and now being forced to train pilots 'at great expense' in Melbourne, but the second part is even meatier:

(you can just imagine Joyce shouting at people in the office in anger saying 'I've come under most unfair attack again):

Rear Window

Alan Joyce’s Helsinki final act

Joe AstonColumnist

May 22, 2023 – 7.44pm

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce fronted a press conference on Friday to turn the first sod on a new pilot training centre in Sydney’s St Peters opening early next year. While Qantas and Jetstar pilots will be trained there, the centre will be operated by Canadian training company CAE, which will also own the simulators.

It is easily forgotten that construction was underway on Qantas’ new $165 million flight training centre adjacent to its Mascot headquarters after the existing, company-owned centre was compulsorily acquired by the NSW government for the Sydney Gateway road project.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”. Jean Chung

In 2020, when COVID hit, Joyce halted construction, wrote off the sunk costs and sold the land for $100 million. Qantas spent many millions relocating its flight sims interstate and since then, the company has been sending its Sydney-based pilots, at great expense, to train in Melbourne.

The timing of Joyce’s pilot training announcement was, in trademark Qantas fashion, too smart by half. It was so nakedly designed to compensate for the anticipated anger of his pilots at Joyce’s other news that day: that Qantas will bolster its international network by wet leasing – which means leasing a plane with a crew attached – two A330 aircraft from Finnair.

Qantas pilots (and cabin crew) are rightly outraged because Qantas has only just retired two of its own A330s from the passenger fleet and handed them to Qantas Freight.

“Those aircraft were domestic aircraft that were perfect for converting into freighters,” Joyce claimed on Friday.

This is yet another extraordinary statement by Joyce, in a budding oeuvre of them.

As he well knows, all Qantas A330s ply a mix of domestic and international routes. In the final month those two Qantas A330s flew as passenger aircraft, they operated to Auckland, Bali, Jakarta and Singapore.

Joyce is attempting to create a completely false distinction between so-called “domestic” A330s he’s erased and the Asian A330 routes he’s now sub-contracting to Finnair. Niko, Mikael and Johannes are preparing for their three-year working holiday in Bangkok while Alan is on Redbubble ordering gigantic empennage magnets printed with the Qantas livery.

The five-year Finnair deal converts to a dry lease – so operated by Qantas crew – for its second half. Either way, Joyce will be long gone.

“This doesn’t lose a single Australian job: they are positive for the creation of jobs and anyone who says anything else is just completely wrong", Joyce said.

Anyone who says bussing in pilots and flight attendants from offshore will cost Australian jobs is just plain wrong! Woah. There is a lot going on there, there really is. There may need to be a new procedure entered in the Qantas emergency management plan entitled “When the CEO denounces the blinding truth as a lie”.

Who else wants to live in Alan’s world? He should Airbnb rooms in his house of cognitive distortion. In this magical palace, put on your enchanted spectacles and you, too, can inhabit a universe where anyone who says anything else is completely wrong.

“The other thing it does [is] it adds more capacity internationally,” Joyce continued. “We’re getting a lot of queries from customers, ‘When are airfares going to normalise?’, and these are the ways you normalise airfares. You get these aircraft and capacity back in the air so airfares start coming down.”

Here, Joyce is spritzing the weary passenger with a touch of refreshing cabin spray. I’m normalising situations for you. Airfares will come down now. I’m not just doing what a rational businessperson would do, trying to exploit voracious demand, I’m sliding down the optimisation curve, all for you. I’m leaving soon, dear customer, but not until you love me.

The patterns of Joyce’s approval-seeking are so consistent. Here he is, hoping we’ll taste a little bit of mint in our last bite of the shit sandwich, and we’ll all remember him as Joycey the great competition champion, the frequent flyer’s friend. It’s unreal.

Of course, the real issue here is not the number of Australian jobs forgone by dint of two planes crewed by Helsinki hardbodies. The real issue is why Qantas even needs them.

The real issue is Joyce’s premeditated dereliction of widebody fleet renewal. It is his cancellation of 40 firm Boeing 787s and eight A380s, both orders he inherited. It is Joyce’s failure to order any other widebody aircraft until last year, when he ordered 12 A350s that won’t start arriving until FY26...

...Joyce and the Qantas board have not placed any order for the replacement of its 26 dog-tired A330 aircraft, the backbone of the Asia network, whose average age is now 16.5 years (six of them have already turned 20). Their failure to do so has created a looming capability gap. Even if Qantas makes an order this year, the first of any replacements will not arrive for several years.

Blind Freddy can see that these decisions by Joyce have cost thousands of Australian jobs and significantly reduced Qantas’ international capacity; and that he made almost all of them well before COVID.

The only real normalisation coming for Qantas is at the AGM in November, when they put Alan in his straitjacket and wheel him out of there. The planes will keep flying, just, but the mad hot takes will never be the same.