Qantas seems stuck for words over QF50, the Qantas flight that had a minor emergency at Sydney Airport on Wednesday morning. The flight was given priority landing because of a malfunctioning fuel valve during a flight from Auckland.
To consumers, Qantas insisted QF50 was a Qantas 737, painted in Qantas livery, including the words “Spirit of Australia.”
But to reporters, and even in evidence to Fair Work Australia, Qantas insists QF50 is a Jetconnect flight. Meaning, it was operated by its independent but wholly owned NZ subsidiary of the same name. Jetconnect is a name Qantas goes to great pains to avoid using in order not to “confuse” consumers, who might reasonably have though that something with a QF flight number is the real thing, and not part of an ambitious plan to de-Australianise Qantas as much as possible.
According to the Australian and International Pilots Association, the Jetconnect airline is a sham to replace Australian jobs (and taxation and superannuation obligations) with New Zealand terms and conditions.
Whatever the merits of that claim, on which a ruling is pending, Jetconnect is part of the branding deception which masks the transfers of Qantas assets and jobs overseas, both in its own right and through its Jetstar brand.
Jetstar now has two Australian registered wide bodied A330-200s based in Singapore, and are flown by Australian and international employees, into and out of Australia, who are employed on Singaporean terms and conditions.
The NZ Jetconnect strategy involved New Zealand registered aircraft, and bears some comparison to the Jetstar New Zealand cadet pilot scheme, in which the inductees spent most of their time in New Zealand (up to three days) opening bank accounts and getting New Zealand tax file numbers so they could be paid and taxed as though they were living and working in that country rather than in Australia.
All of these “devices” are seen by Qantas group management as the answer to its professed inability to generate adequate returns from Qantas international services or compete with overseas carriers.
In the cold light of day, much of the failings of the Qantas group are related to bad management. This is most notable in terms of poor network, product and fleet decisions, which are reflected in shrinking market shares and earnings which fail to sustain dividends or an adequate share price.
Qantas plans to base a much larger fraction of its group fleet in Singapore as, or if, it gets Boeing 787s to fly from there to Europe instead of flying from here to Europe via Singapore with Australian employees.
The obvious questions were sent to Qantas this morning:
What is the future of the Qantas Australian Childrens Choir?
Will the Qantas anthem continue to be I Still Call Australia Home when the public increasingly realise that the plot is to call Auckland or Singapore home?
Why is the symbol for Jetconnect flights operated for Qantas with QF flight numbers identical to that of Qantas, that is, a red triangle, on qantas.com?
If Qantas goes to the trouble of telling customers who book online that Jetstar flights aren’t Qantas flights by using a different colored symbol and a JQ designator, when will it differentiate between real and fake Qantas flights?
Should Qantas answer these questions later today they will be posted on Plane Talking, where the other story of the moment is the laying of criminal charges against a Pacific Blue pilot for illegally taking off after dark from mountain ringed Queenstown Airport last June.
It was a serious breach of the safety rules by the Virgin Blue subsidiary, but the New Zealand authorities claim this was all the fault of the pilot, not the carrier, which raises some rather important liability issues.
Not defending QANTAS in this instance, but Mr Sandilands should be well aware that a flight number is often no indication as to who actually operates the flights. Codeshares are a staple of airlines the world over.
DrSmithy,
They also come with disclosure obligations intended to prevent trickery or deception.
I’ve referred a screen grab from Qantas.com to the ACCC asking whether or not it fully conforms with those rules on disclosure, with which I am familiar. The normal protocol with code share designations is that the airline designator of the code sharer will also be shown. That is QF and another two letter combination such as JL or JQ or CX. There is no two letter designator applied to Jetconnect. This is Qantas selling a service on what it claims is another airline yet which has no designation as ‘another airline.’
It appears to me that while Qantas treats its Jetstar codeshares according to all the rules, it doesn’t do this, in full, with the airline it has difficulty even mentioning to consumers. Why?
I don’t understand the rationale for Qantas’ elaborate charade. Presumably it wants to retain its designation as the Australian international flag carrier to ensure that the Australian Government allocates landing rights to protect it from competition. But why does the Australian Government insist on this extensive protectionism, especially since the protection that supported Australian shipping companies has been removed and the Gillard Government proclaims its support for free trade, especially in international trade?
I would auction landing rights to all carriers who met safety standards and paid their bills. If that resulted in Qantas going out of business, what would be the loss?