QANTAS has, for the last 10+, had a CEO who was not part of this culture and did everything he could to drive costs down. He laid off huge swaths of engineers, outsourced key maintenance contracts to the lowest bidder and left the airline with an aging fleet that needs billions spent to replenish. He was recently fired by the board for essentially destroying the reputation of the airline within Australia, with their practice of cancelling flights at short notice, illegally sacking thousands of staff during COVID and taking 100's of millions of dollars from the Australian government to keep staff employed during the airline's grounding during COVID and handing it all to shareholders.
It is a situation very similar to the downfall of Boeing.
The destruction of Qantas as a quality airline is entirely driven by exactly the same MBA/shareholder-value bullshit that destroyed Boeing and others.
Financial engineers should be banned from operating businesses. They are not focused on the quality of the business, from which profits are derived. They work backwards from their financially engineered results to drive down "costs", even if those "costs" are entirely essential to the operation of the business.
Qantas (and its subsidiary Jetstar) are having to recover their engineering, customer service, and other "costs" to actually achieve the operating business that their expensive tickets require. Currently they are being priced out of operating in Asia, not because they have too expensive operations, but because their board and CxOs were entirely driven by shareholders, not the ongoing operation of the business.
Indeed. Qantas has been ranked the safest airline int he world almost every year since forever [1]
I clearly remember when QF32 happened and everyone was utterly shocked. That simply DOES NOT happen to Qantas.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2023/01/03/ran...