It’s not as though Qantas can look at its latest result in the World Airline Awards and shrug its shoulders. Instead,it should roll up its sleeves.
In my near four decades of flying that exact route as a Qantas captain,l learnt that especially during the wet season there are particular challenges pilots face.
We have been conditioned to put our seatbelts on,and keep them on,whenever we get into a car. So why not put them on and keep them on when we’re in the air?
All the commentary has been about one man,but I think it’s important that Vanessa Hudson remembers the airline was great when it was the sum of its parts.
Once upon a time,Qantas had a proud engineering tradition where almost all components of the aircraft were overhauled at their wonderful engineering hangars in downtown Mascot.
There’s only one thing better than flying,and that is sharing its fascination with others.
I wasn’t in the cockpit yesterday,but during my 36 years as a Qantas pilot,I found myself facing several in-flight malfunctions and emergencies similar to the one encountered by the crew of QF144.
Cockpits are full of alarms that sound when disaster is imminent. When I read of the push by some airlines for one-pilot cockpits,I was sure I could hear an alarm going off.
It didn’t take Einstein to work out that when the world came out of lockdowns and border restrictions eased that people would be desperately hungry to travel.