I was a Qantas captain for 37 years. This chaos did not need to happen

Pilots go through checks at least four times a year, every year. Are you tested that often in your profession? Imagine if you had to take your driving test four times a year.

That’s a lot of time, effort and investment just to get off the ground. To reverse the stand-down process and regain those skills for a pilot takes time – not days or weeks or months sometimes, but years.

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To make matters worse, during the first year of the pandemic the airline offered voluntary redundancy to all its staff. An effort to stop disastrous financial hemorrhage. These packages looked very good, particularly to those with years of service such as myself, who were in the last decade of their commercial career. The news painted a picture every day of uncertainty, as if we might never fly again. In the end, around 2000 of the most experienced of us left the airline, approximately 300 pilots among that.

Much more than 100 years of experience and institutional knowledge walked out the door. Not just pilots but check-in staff, cabin crew, and engineers … to name just a few. You can’t replace that collective experience overnight.

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. The chaos we see at our airports is a direct result of this short-term thinking.

I see from the sidelines how our passengers are being treated and it seems so obvious why loyalties are drying up, and why no one is feeling the Spirit of Australia much these days.

I am truly saddened to see Qantas dragged through the mud. All because of the short-sightedness of someone desperately trying to balance the chequebook, maintain a share price and, consequently, their bonus scheme.

It all could have been solved so easily by Qantas showing some reciprocal loyalty to its dedicated and loyal staff, which could have been transferred to our loyal and dedicated passengers.

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