Ocker Airways

I think what I resented was the false familiarity, increasingly engaged in by some cabin staff. The egalitarian branding of service, that gradually morphed into an attitude that cabin staff were doing passengers a favour by merely doing their job.

Recently I had to break my rule and travelled to Hong Kong on Qantas. I took a jacket with me on board. I asked if I could hang it and was told the hanging space was full. I scrunched it into an overhead locker. On arrival I watched what came out of the coat locker, and yes, they were the jackets that the crew had laid claim to.

The crew on the outwards flight seemed tired and some clearly lacked training in the art of service, the return flight was no better. The male cabin staff appeared to have come straight out of a shearing shed. Brusqueness coupled with a real or assumed ockerism was apparently de rigueur.

Down the aisle went the gun shearer calling out to no one in particular "Chinese tea anyone, Chinese tea", yeah, well, no thanks mate.

At the end of the flight I gave the bruiser a wan smile and a nod and he looked straight through me. I guess that is fair enough, I was travelling stock class and that was how I had been made to feel, just a dumb sheep on a transporter.

I don't blame the staff or crews. Clearly there is a lack of leadership on the part of the board and senior management. I was in the army myself. When crew morale is poor, it needs lifting; clear guidelines, a sense of direction and maintenance of proper standards of service and behaviour.

Qantas clearly has some people of ability. Captain Richard de Crespigny demonstrated this when he saved 466 passengers in November 2010 on an A380 flight, QF32. No. 2 engine spectacularly failed over the Indonesian island of Batam causing damage to the nacelle, wing, fuel system, landing gear and flight controls. Passengers were fulsome in their praise of the Captain and the manner in which the crew handled the crisis.

No doubt the human talent and skills are still to be found amongst Qantas employees, but they are being poorly handled. They constitute the biggest asset Qantas has and they are being treated worse than some of their passengers.

Rather than allowing Joyce's flights of fancy to turn Qantas into a memory, a quavering chimera out at Longreach, the board of Qantas should pull themselves together and axe Joyce. There are other people available with the talent, not only to run the airline, but to turn its fortunes around on shore.