THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW: ALAN JOYCE,chief executive of Qantas
IT’S BEEN a tough two months for Alan Joyce, the boyish Irishman who heads up Australia’s national carrier Qantas.
Rather than basking in the warm media glow of the airline's 90th birthday celebrations last November, at which Qantas ambassador at large John Travolta belted out a rendition of the Greaseclassic Summer Nights, the 44-year-old from Tallaght has been fighting a scrappy press relations war over the carrier's safety record following the near catastrophic engine failure of a Qantas A380 over Indonesia.
The incident prompted the airline to ground its entire fleet of superjumbos and catapulted Joyce into his first major crisis since taking over the controls at Qantas in November 2008.
Suddenly it seemed as if the Flying Kangaroo – the nickname refers to the logo – was in danger of losing its reputation as the world’s safest airline. The pressure on Joyce has been unrelenting.
A day after the A380 engine blowout, another Qantas jet, this time a Boeing 747, was forced to make an emergency landing at Singapore airport.
The unions, who have accused Qantas of undermining the carrier’s safety credentials by outsourcing maintenance work abroad, seized on the events as further proof of declining standards.
Even a publicity stunt aimed at bolstering confidence in the superjumbo was overshadowed when engine problems delayed the departure of a Qantas Boeing 747 just hours after Joyce jetted out of Sydney on the first A380 to be returned to service following the safety scare earlier that month. By this stage the Australian media were questioning whether an iconic brand was on its deathbed.
Joyce gives such assessments short shrift. In the confines of his luxurious office close to Sydney airport, he insists Qantas’s reputation remains “unblemished”.
He claims the airline’s decision to ground all six of its A380s “elevated our safety reputation among the general public”. And he points out the QF32 flight, labelled a “titanic near miss” by one Australian newspaper, “was not something that was caused by Qantas; it was a Rolls Royce engine failure. And what was very good was how the crew and pilots handled it, so that was a credit to Qantas”.
A recent report by Australian air accident investigators backs this assertion, but also emphasises how close the A380 came to complete catastrophe, detailing an almost overwhelming set of system failures.
In Joyce’s rather faltering account of the near disaster, in which he avoids using any words like explosion, fire, or blowout, he recalls how the alarm bells first started ringing when the share price mysteriously nose-dived.
“And the reason for that, turned out to be, that we picked up pretty soon, obviously the aircraft had taken off from Singapore, the engine, the engine . . . the uncontained failure had taken place six minutes out.”
Joyce’s cautious circumlocutions are the very antithesis of Michael O’Leary’s no-holds-barred approach. But then it’s difficult to imagine interviewing O’Leary in a swish executive suite with a corporate adviser sitting in on the discussion, notebook and pen at the ready.
Joyce carries on in hushed tones. “The parts of the engine had fallen into Indonesia, one of those parts was a [section] of the engine which had the kangaroo and a triangle on it. Somebody on the ground had interpreted that as the tail of the aircraft and had tweeted it and the tweets had been picked up by some of the news agencies and one of the news agencies had inappropriately put the story out that a Qantas aircraft had crashed without researching the facts.
When that news item had come out on the networks, of course it caused the problem with the um, it caused the crash of the share price.”
Although the engine erupted into flames shortly after take-off, Joyce points out the aircraft was in the sky for almost two hours before it was cleared to land. So was he on tenterhooks during that time?
“Well, there’s standard procedures and processes to go through and, believe it or not, it’s very calm and collected. People know what we need to achieve, what we need to focus in on . . . we were all focused on what was needed.”
In the immediate aftermath of the scare, Joyce was quick to foist the blame on the A380’s engine manufacturers, Rolls Royce – a strategy that won him praise from pundits
However, he dismisses suggestions the constant drip feed of technical failures at the airline is denting confidence in the carrier.
"The Herald Sunhad a great report on a tyre that I think we had on an aircraft. It was a minor issue, the aircraft got delayed by 2½ hours . . . and a lot of the comments underneath it read along the lines of 'what next? Are we going to see a report for cold coffee in economy?' It was getting to that stage, so I think the travelling public does understand what is significant and what isn't significant."
Nevertheless, the day after our interview, Qantas hit the headlines again when a Sydney to Melbourne flight was forced to turn back with a suspected wing flap failure.
The mild-mannered maths enthusiast who started out in Aer Lingus as an operations research analyst has maintained a relatively positive media image compared with rival Irish aviation heavy-hitters Michael O’Leary and Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways.
The only dust-up so far has been over his accent, which hovers oddly between thick Dublin tones and an incipient Aussie twang. The editor of the Australianissued a letter of apology to Joyce after one of the newspaper's columnists mocked his Irish brogue in an article on the airline chief's statements about the A380 incident.
Yet while O’Leary and Walsh have conducted running battles with unions in their drive to lower costs, Joyce has adopted a comparatively inclusive approach and stresses he has no desire to shrink the airline’s 35,000-strong workforce. “I want to employ more people”, he says, then smiles and adds “there are no guarantees in life”.
Born in 1966 to a large working-class family, his mother was a cleaner and his father a factory worker, Joyce’s rise to the top of Australia’s corporate ladder has been meteoric.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he shows little regret at bowing out of the race for Aer Lingus’s new chief executive in 2005 following Willie Walsh’s departure. He says he was persuaded at the time to remain as the head of Jetsar, Qantas’s budget airline which he nursed from infancy and which now ranks as one of Australia’s top low-cost carriers, by his predecessor Geoff Dixon.
Like Walsh over at BA, Joyce insists he has no intention of turning Qantas into a budget carrier. The bulk of Qantas’s profits now stem from its all-important Frequent Flier business and Joyce maintains the outlook for 2011 is “really positive”. He wants Qantas to capitalise on the “continued growth in China” which he describes as the “centre of the aviation universe”.
Not only does Joyce enjoy a base salary of $1.7 million Australian dollars (€1.3 million), he concedes the frequent hobnobbing with celebrities, in the context of promoting Qantas, is one of the “nice parts of the jobs”.
ON THE RECORD
Position: Chief executive of Qantas
Age: 44
Family: Not married.
Hobbies: Reading, jogging, photography. He particularly enjoys "maths- related books".
Something that might surprise:He didn't fly until he reached the age of 23 when he was working for Aer Lingus.
Something that might not surprise: He has no plans to return to live in Ireland in the near future.