Is Alan Joyce on his final flight? A history of the Qantas CEO's fight against everyone

Perhaps it's the luck of the Irish.

Despite a consistent record of alienating all three key elements of the business he heads, Qantas boss Alan Joyce somehow has remained at the controls of the airline for the best part of a decade and a half, one of the longest stints in corporate Australian history.

Occasionally, he's managed to do it all at once. Such as now.

Joyce simultaneously is grappling with a revolt from angry customers, fending off a battle with thousands of employees and former workers, all while trying to quell an outbreak of hostilities with shareholders.

"I think I've had more resignation requests than any other CEO and probably any other public figure out there," he told a press conference last Thursday after unveiling yet another huge loss, the third in a row.

Qantas roughly halves its full-year loss to $860 million, as revenue jumps 54 per cent from 2021.

It's a bold claim, particularly coming in a week that saw former prime minister Scott Morrison vainly attempting to defend his bizarre decision to secretly appoint himself as head of five ministries.

As the Qantas boss candidly admits, almost with a sense of pride, his workforce was demanding his ejection from the top job back in 2011 and 2013.

During his long reign, he's presided over a cumulative loss of $2.8 billion, hardly the kind of performance that would earn anyone the accolades of the business world.

He's sacked workers in their thousands, outsourced the jobs of thousands of others and deliberately alienated his customers, leaving them stranded at various ports around the world.

Through all this, Joyce has had the backing of government to the point where Qantas can boast that it has received more taxpayer welfare than any other company in the nation's history.

Somehow, he's managed not to just hang on, but to regularly feature among the highest-paid executives in the land. And, if he has his way, he'll be staying on for as long as he deems fit.

Airlines are a mug's game, at least from an investor perspective. The few truly independent operations have to compete against heavily subsidised or outright government-owned airlines, making them a highly risky financial enterprise.

They operate at the whim of gyrating fuel prices, geopolitical tensions and the occasional pandemic, like SARS and COVID-19. That's on top of the normal economic forces. Running one is no walk in the park.

For some weird reason, they often are a source of national pride and fascination, and thereby attract an undue amount of scrutiny. That's particularly the case with Qantas.

A Qantas engineer made an error that released hundreds of oxygen masks but failed to accurately document the problem. As engineers strike over pay, profit results are released and a jet base insider reveals widespread stress among staff, what can we learn about an airline under pressure?

Newspapers, and the media in general, are obsessed with reporting on anything it does. Maybe it's the tyranny of distance, the product of a relatively small population on a big island at the end of the world. Transport is crucial to our survival.

That may also explain why governments often view Qantas in a different light than any other company. Most see it as a special case, an essential service, the national flag carrier.

While most Australians would be unable to name the current head of BHP, one of the world's biggest miners and an outfit that still is known as "The Big Australian" decades after the ad campaign ended, almost everyone knows Alan Joyce.

That profile and recognition place the Qantas boss in a unique position, one that has cut him far more slack than if was he running any other company.

Melbourne Cup Day 2011 was a day that went down in infamy. Instead of the "race that stops the nation", it was a Dubliner who brought the country to a halt.

The previous Saturday, Qantas grounded its fleet on an order from the CEO, leaving around 98,000 customers stranded around the world. Thousands were left sitting on the tarmac perplexed and angry while vast numbers were placed in hotels and many more just left hanging.

Months in the planning, the grounding was a bid by the Qantas hierarchy to belt its unions into submission and end an escalating, long-running dispute over pay and conditions.

It worked, to a degree. Fair Work ordered an end to the dispute, noting the airline's actions to lock out staff "threatens to cause significant damage to tourism and air transport industries", while pointedly adding the union actions were unlikely to damage the two industries.

The cost, however, was immense. Aside from the $200 million total from the dispute, it put the federal government and then-transport minister Anthony Albanese offside, infuriated customers globally, alienated its workforce and left investors scratching their heads.

And for the first time since it was floated on the stock exchange two decades earlier, it plunged into the red with a $244 million loss.

Strategically, the move was a disaster. It provided Joyce's arch rival John Borghetti, the man he had beaten to the top post at Qantas and who then had walked across the tarmac to head up Virgin, with a free kick.

Borghetti piled on extra flights to ensure the Melbourne Cup was a success and then took Qantas head-on.

As a fight, it was intensely personal. But it almost sent both airlines broke.

Qantas holds the dubious distinction of being the nation's biggest recipient of corporate welfare and the pandemic wasn't the only time it went begging to Canberra.

Alan Joyce says it's "not good enough" that Qantas customers have been been dealing with flight delays, cancellations and lost baggage over the past few months. 

You can't blame Alan Joyce for the financial disaster the pandemic wreaked on international and domestic travel, forcing the airline to mothball its fleet and deprive itself of income.

But Qantas now stands accused of using the disaster to reshape its workforce, after receiving close to $2 billion in various support measures, including JobKeeper.

It sacked 6,000 workers at the start of the crisis, claiming it would have gone broke otherwise, and outsourced 2,000 ground jobs which the Federal Court recently upheld as a breach of the Fair Work Act.

Again, the hardline stance against its workforce has come back to bite. Its shambolic performance in recent months has seen flights cancelled and delayed as illness, inexperienced staff and worker shortages create chaos with baggage routinely being lost or sent off into the ether.

Once the envy of the aviation world with impeccable credentials, its ratings for safety and customer service have been slipping for years, although the airline still has the highest possible safety rating of seven stars.

It's worth remembering that while the pandemic losses of the past three years have been huge – around $4.5 billion – they pale into insignificance with the own goal Joyce kicked in his debilitating fight with Virgin's Borghetti a decade ago.

For almost three years, as Qantas attempted to obliterate Virgin, it refused to concede market share to its domestic rival, constantly slashing fares. It was terrific for customers but running at a loss has its limits.

As cancellations and delays threaten Qantas's reputation with customers and its budget faces challenging conditions, can the airline turn things around?

There were problems elsewhere, too. Qantas set about trying to establish cut-price operations in Hong Kong and Japan, buying aircraft for the missions before securing regulatory permission.

The combination almost sent Qantas broke and at least one major liquidation firm was running the numbers on the beleaguered operation, preparing to step in on behalf of either the government or creditors.

When the chief executive unveiled the results for 2014, they weren't pretty. A full-year loss of $2.8 billion — one of the biggest single-year losses in Australian history — and a "transformation plan" to get the operation back on track.

The "transformation" involved the usual formula — mass sackings and cost cuts.

Behind the scenes, Joyce had gone cap in hand, first to the Gillard government and then to the Abbot government, seeking $3 billion in taxpayer support. Then-treasurer Joe Hockey initially was open to the idea but was overruled by the prime minister and cabinet.

Despite that chequered performance, the Qantas boss regularly has featured amongst the nation's highest-paid. In 2018, he earned $23.9 million, topping the list of executive salaries. 

The last few years have been leaner, although he still managed to pull in $1.9 million last year as the operation clocked up huge losses.

But the charmed life may be coming to an end, despite all the bravado. After 14 years at the controls, the airline's reputation is tarnished. And, with growing anger at its operational and financial performance, the Qantas boss is running short of allies.

Alan Joyce may well be close to disembarking. Will he get a golden parachute?

Editor's note: This article was amended on 31/8/2022 to add that Qantas still retains the highest possible safety rating of seven stars.

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced.

AEST = Australian Eastern Standard Time which is 10 hours ahead of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)