Qantas Flight Quotes

Afraid to move and give away his nervousness, Zubair was in no hurry. Once most of the other passengers were gone, he retrieved his computer bag and made his way down the narrow stairs to the main body of the plane. He half expected to see a group of men in suits waiting for him, but thankfully there were none. He’d been warned that the Americans had gotten much better at intercepting people who were trying to illegally enter their country. Two female flight attendants with whorish makeup and skirts that were far too short stood by the door. They thanked him for flying Qantas. Despite what his trainers had told him, Zubair ignored the women, refusing to look them in the eye. Fortunately for him his diminutive stature made him seem shy rather than hostile. Zubair was just five and a half feet tall, and weighed a svelte 142 pounds. With his mustache shaved he easily passed for someone five to ten years younger than his twenty-nine years. He stepped into the Jetway, joining the stampede for baggage claim and customs and sandwiched between the business-class and economy customers. The stress of the situation and the heat of the enclosed Jetway triggered the scientist’s sweat glands, sending them into overdrive. Within seconds salty perspiration dampened every inch of his skin. Zubair felt trapped, as if he was on a conveyor belt headed toward his own execution. There was no turning back. Passengers continued to pour off the plane, pushing forward, moving through the confined tunnel toward U.S. Customs agents who would ask probing questions. Zubair suddenly wished he had taken the sedative that they had given him to calm his nerves. He had thrown the pills away at the Sydney airport. Allah would never approve of him taking a mood-altering drug.

What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? “That moment is really the turning point,” Barbara Burian, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied Qantas Flight 32, told me. “When de Crespigny decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset. Now, he’s deciding where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions. “Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,” Burian said. “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.

As a young revenue manager at Irish carrier Aer Lingus in the early 1990s, Joyce had – with the help of his younger brother Anthony, an actuary – designed the mathematical model for overbooking flights on the basis that a percentage of passengers never turn up. ‘That’s how he made a name for himself at the start of his career, and he’s ended it the same way,’ I wrote in the AFR. ‘He’s optimised revenue to the point where it’s now the planes that don’t show up for the flights. It’s a logical extension.

Joyce did not return to Qantas headquarters that day. That evening, he headed to Sydney airport to catch Emirates’ last flight to Dubai and onwards to Dublin. He was captured by a Daily Telegraph photographer rolling his suitcases through the departures hall, an image that was emblazoned across the next day’s edition. ‘Australians all let us REJOYCE’ went the headline – the same pun I’d deployed on the front page of Qantas’ staff newspaper when Joyce started the job all those years ago. The popular joke that day in TV news bulletins and newspaper columns was: finally, Qantas had managed an early departure. But the gag was flawed. Joyce’s grand miscalculation was to leave four years too late.

Several weeks later, Hywood learned from his subordinates that Qantas was terminating its $2 million advertising spend with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and removing complimentary copies of the papers from domestic boarding gates and onboard flights. He called Joyce for an explanation and Joyce told him there was no point running Qantas ads in newspapers that carried negative stories about it. ‘I asked him, “Alan, do you believe in the freedom of the press?” He said, “Of course I do.” So I said, “Well, the thing about the press is that it asks questions of institutions and people in power that they can’t or won’t ask of themselves and by doing so, keeps the community cohesive and civil and prevents it from breaking down. Government and the commercial world must understand that it’s to everybody’s benefit, including theirs, that this system is sustained, and it’s sustained by advertising. If every advertiser pulled their ads because there were negative stories, the system would simply fall apart. So what you’re doing is jeopardising the underlying principles of the freedom of the press.” ’ Unsurprisingly, Joyce didn’t see it that way. In response to Qantas’ advertising boycott, Fairfax shifted its $2 million corporate travel account from Qantas to Virgin Australia. In turn, Virgin

Finch’s tour de force was not yet over. ‘Chair, it’s 6:30pm. The last flight to Sydney leaves in about 35 minutes. We have been here since three o’clock.’ Australia has a cottage industry in ex-government staffers whose role is solely to coach company executives for these parliamentary hearings. The first thing inculcated into witnesses is that they’re on the MPs’ turf and are governed by their rules. ‘You can’t just walk out like it’s a play you don’t like,’ says one regular consultant. The other universal rule: never, ever be a smartarse; it worked once for Kerry Packer and then literally never again. ‘I guess you’re delayed, Mr Finch, at the discretion of the committee,’ McKenzie said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘We’ve still got questions, and we will be pursuing them until we’re finished.’ As Simon Birmingham put it to me later, ‘There’s often one moment when hours of disciplined effort by those around you is undone, where you lose the room in an instant. [Finch] worrying about the time of the last flight was that moment.’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone express the arrogance that Finch expressed on that day,’ says Tony Sheldon. ‘To say, “You’re all wasting my time, I’ve got better things to do, I’m catching my flight” showed so little respect to the Australian public.’ The committee excused Goyder, Hudson and Finch at 6:40pm. Theirs was a long drive back to Sydney.