Re: Female airline pilot pulled from flight just minutes before take off after cabin
Apparently pilots are "parts" now.
Advice for Qantas soon to be fired.
Luckier her will get a short memo announcing her departure to “pursue personal interests” and a token year-end bonus. Less lucky her will get a few hours to clean out her desk.
For decades this has been the brutal way of the aviation industry. Your boss has to cut headcount and you are, contrary to what your mother told you that you are unique and special, just another head.
At least in the past, there was hope. The boss who gave you a pink slip also gave you a pep talk: Aviation ran in cycles. It was down but not out. Aviation and your career would come back stronger than ever.
And sure the pep talk was disingenuous touchy-feely nonsense. But it turned out their boss was right.
Just look at the mass layoffs in the last two decades. They came long list after the oil shock
Airline bankruptcies in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ; more recently 2001-2002 (Ansett), 2004 (United Airline), 2011 (American Airline) and currently (Japanese airline)
Somehow, Australian aviation industry remained the land of opportunity. Virgin filled up the vacuum of Ansett and Qantas workforce remained steadily around thirty thousand.
No more. This time around it may finally, really, truly and unfortunately be different for you and the aviation industry. I’m sorry to report that unless you’re an airline in-house lawyer or compliance officer, I haven’t come up with much cause for optimism.
The best I can do is concoct a little scenario in which a bull run in Olympics and Northern hemisphere summer vacation, Aviation’s old-line businesses.
But sadly, that’s table stakes. For decades now, Qantas has counted on something big – something fiery, flashy and full of fees to keep the profits flowing. It was budget airline Jetstar in the last decade. Then came fuel surcharge, meal charge, brewery charge, baggage charge, booking fee, booking changing fee, the up-coming loo fee, and on and on…always the next big thing.
Today the only thing we can count on is government oversight – the carbon tax, the emission trading scheme. That’s aviation’s next big thing. And if you currently work in aviation, it’s awfully hard to see all that regulation getting you a bigger bonus.
But just hang on, you might say! How can you forget aviation’s last great frontier and its best hope for the future, the world’s ever-rising, ever-miraculous emerging markets?
I haven’t. No doubt, the BRIC nations will generate billions of dollars in passenger fees in the coming years. No doubt Qantas will get a good chunk of that. But will it be enough to keep all those folks in Qantas fed?
Do the math. Do the headcount. Then ask yourself if Chinese Premier Hu Jin Tao has much of a continuing interest in paying foreign companies fees.
He doesn’t. China wants its own aviation. Already, the global aviation industry profit is forecasted to fall from 7.9Billion in 2011 to 3 Billion this year [
Aviation: Ghost at the feast | The Economist ], half of which is generated by Chinese airlines. Don’t expect a different story in Brazil or
India, where Qantas has only code-sharing and Qantas international is continuously shrinking.
Now, as I said earlier, it’s possible I’m too downbeat on Qantas’s prospects. The future is tough to predict. But here’s one prediction you can take to the bank: in spite of its struggles, Qantas will still pay out multimillion dollar bonuses every year.
You see, at Qantas, the rules of the game may change, but the end-game never does. People work here for the money. That means there will always be a bonus pool for Qantas executives at year-end, even if you’re not around to share in it.
Sadly, some of you will soon discover this truth. Pay attention to your boss’s pep talk on your exit. If you hear him say that “Qantas will rebound because it always has!” – ask him, politely, to prove it.
Then go find yourself another career.
