Titanium-Man: How Alan Joyce has survived the union and passenger attacks

All this after racking up billions of dollars in losses.

This performance has been more than enough for Joyce, not just to win a reprieve from Qantas chairman Richard Goyder, but to receive his lavish praise and accolades including a description of Joyce as “the best CEO in Australia by a length of a straight”.

So if shareholders did want to push to remove Joyce, they would need to go through Goyder – which would mean getting rid of both the chief executive and the chairman.

And Qantas’ shareholder register shows no evidence of containing any well-known activist shareholders looking for a stoush.

For the most part, Qantas shareholders are also happy with Joyce’s performance. Their gushing-meter does not match up with that of Goyder – they recognise that Joyce has made mistakes and understand that Qantas service levels are sub-par.

But Joyce has two highly effective weapons hidden in his flak jacket – the first is that shareholders believe he is the best person to fix Qantas’ problems, and the second (which is related to the first) is that there are no internal candidates with the appropriate experience to do a better job.

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In 2020, when Qantas raised $1.4 billion, Joyce gave an informal undertaking to shareholders to remain with the company through the COVID crisis, which, according to sources inside the company, was a key to the success of the equity raising.

But it is the service performance of Qantas over the past six months since borders have reopened that has so infuriated passengers.

Waves of performance issues, starting with enormously lengthy queues for passengers waiting on Qantas phone staff, to poor on-time departures, to lost baggage, have left customers enraged.

The partial admission and apology from Joyce a few weeks ago don’t seem to have hit the mark, with a chorus of critics now in harmony with various Qantas unions suggesting the airline cut staff levels too deeply.

With the value of hindsight, this is clearly true. At the time Qantas engaged in a vicious cost-cutting exercise, but one which left the company vulnerable to some external shocks.

This year, the number of staff on sick leave as the Omicron variant tore through Australia, and a swath of staff leaving the industry, was exactly the shock that hadn’t been in Qantas’ contingency plans.

Joyce is acutely aware he needs to address the service performance issues. His office is adorned with a large digital screen with live time updates on flight cancellations and on-time performance levels.

He is sure to be paying it more attention.