‘All skeleton’: Can Qantas’ new CEO salvage an airline amid the wreckage?

‘What she needs to realise is that she won’t get customers back until she gets the staff back,’ a pilot told Crikey.

Incoming Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)

There was a certain sense of timing when one of Qantas’ oldest long-haul planes, an A330, was damaged by a pushback tug (used to tow vehicles) in Brisbane on Monday night. It happened just as Alan Joyce was penning his resignation letter as Qantas CEO two months early, handing the reins to his successor, Vannessa Hudson.

The tug was one of a fleet gifted to company Dnata in Joyce’s spree of outsourcing and asset sales, which has left the company “like a skinny dingo, all skeleton and barely alive, just getting by in a long drought”, as one engineer put it. He added that the “fat reserves are all but gone. That is how we feel right now. But there is hope that with a bit of rain, things will turn around.”

It was the second twin-aisle plane — after a belt loader hit a 787 on August 19, according to engineers — that has had major damage inflicted by outsourced, often low-paid and casual staff driving essential ground equipment. “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” a Qantas pilot said, adding that such accidents had noticeably increased since Joyce started outsourcing staff and running down on-the-ground resources.

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