Many airlines struggled to see a future for their enormous Airbus SE A380s when the pandemic grounded fleets in early 2020. Qantas Airways Ltd. parked its 12 double-deckers in the Californian desert, saying they wouldn’t be needed for at least three years, while Etihad Airways said it’s not clear if its 10 superjumbos will ever fly again.

But this year’s sudden travel recovery has given the cavernous jets — often seating more than 500 people — a new lease of life. They have become the long-range jumbo of choice for airlines from the UK to the Gulf and Australia as passenger volumes stretch aviation workforces that were depleted during the crisis.

By the end of 2022, monthly A380 flights will be almost 60% of pre-Covid totals, Cirium data show, defying the jet’s doubters. British Airways will operate more A380 flights by the end of the year than it did before Covid-19.

As international travel returns, the A380’s carrying ability is validating — at least for now — the massive bet by its No. 1 buyer Emirates Group of Dubai and proving useful for carriers such as Qantas that didn’t permanently turn their backs on the giant plane.

The superjumbo — seen as heralding a luxurious new chapter for aviation with its onboard bars and whisper-quiet interior when it was introduced in 2005 — was already falling out of favor before the pandemic hit, as airlines turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient planes. Airbus killed off the program in 2019.

Malaysia Airlines Bhd., Germany’s Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Air France-KLM are among carriers selling or phasing out their fleets.

In June 2020, as Covid-19 swept across around the world, airlines worldwide operated just 43 passenger flights using A380s. The rollout of vaccinations, which allowed governments to peel back border controls, has since changed the picture.

This month, there are almost 4,000 scheduled services using the A380, and about 6,000 planned for January 2023, according to Cirium. Superjumbo services at Singapore Airlines Ltd., which turned one of the jets into a restaurant during the pandemic, will be almost back to normal by the end of 2022, the data show.

Existential Threat

The A380’s appeal to airlines has always been limited. It found no buyers in the US, Latin America or Africa, for instance. Should the current surge in travel demand fade and oil prices stay elevated, carriers like IAG SA’s British Airways may struggle to justify running partially full, four-engined A380s. The arrival of newer, fuel-efficient aircraft would once again pose an existential threat to the superjumbo.

Still, the A380’s value to airlines is likely to extend beyond the current surge, said John Grant, chief analyst at aviation data provider OAG. That’s partly because the small group of carriers flying the plane are either financially committed to the jet or don’t have an immediate alternative, he said.

“I think it has a future for some carriers,” said Grant. “Airlines may well be hoping — or praying — that in 18 months’ time the price of oil will be lower and the A380 will be an ideal aircraft.”

The A380 made its first flight in 2005 and won over passengers with its audacious scale — its wingspan is wider than a soccer pitch. Ultimately, though, airlines were turned off by its high operating costs.

Airbus sold just 251 of the planes and the last delivery, to Emirates, was made in November 2021. The aircraft remains a polarizing force. Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker has described the A380 as the airline’s “biggest mistake.”

Air France-KLM’s French arm is happy to have pulled its 10 A380s from service in 2020, two years earlier than initially planned, avoiding a refurbishment bill of about 400 million euros ($420 million), Anne Rigail, who heads the division, said in Paris Thursday.

“The costs were so high that it was in our interest to move to new-generation planes that are more fuel efficient,” she said. “The A380s were put on the most important routes but were pretty complicated to fill.”

Not everyone sees it that way. Sydney-based Qantas has already put three of it planes back in service and plans to have half the fleet in the air by the end of 2022 for long-haul routes including the flagship Sydney-London service. Ten refitted Qantas A380s are due to return to the skies by early 2024.

Emirates, which operates more than 100 A380s, is retrofitting many of them with premium-economy seats, a class that’s proving popular with leisure travelers with money to burn as the pandemic fades.

Despite the looming crisis, about which Australia’s national carrier had been warned repeatedly, management at the airline had arranged a week of yoga, meditation, Zumba dance classes and a “therapeutic puppy” that staff on the Qantas campus at Mascot could “pat … to take the stress away”.

It was a typical corporate program to “treat” staff. Some within the airline noted it was particularly tone deaf in the lead-up to the busiest travel period in two years, when Qantas had done so much to jettison workers and, in the case of baggage handling, an entire business within the company.

For starters, the relaxation activities were not available to employees who would soon be exposed to angry travellers booked on an airline that apparently had forgotten how to fly. Crucially, however, many of the campus staff at Qantas work in operational roles and they were already severely overworked.

That month, in April, the Spirit of Australia would stand out for posting the worst airline industry performance statistics since recording began in 2003. Just 58.7 per cent of Qantas flights arrived on time, beaten even by its budget subsidiary Jetstar on 59.2 per cent. Virgin Australia recorded 65.6 per cent of flights reaching their destination on time. Regionally, QantasLink performed the worst, behind Virgin and Rex Airlines. The situation was scarcely better when measuring planes that departed on time. Here, the national carrier pipped Jetstar but was still five points behind Virgin, an airline that collapsed during Covid-19 shutdowns and has been somewhat rebuilt by private equity ownership.

After divesting the entirety of its “below the wing” ground handling business – with some 2000 workers at 10 airports – and using the pandemic to offshore hundreds more call centre staff, and to stand down 20,000 workers while claiming $855 million in Job Keeper, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce blamed passengers for mayhem at airports in April.

“I went through the airports on Wednesday and people forget they need to take out their laptops, they have to take out their aerosols … So that is taking longer to get through the [security] queue,” he said at the time. “Our customers are not match fit.”

Later, Joyce – who has earned almost $100 million as the man in charge of Qantas since 2008 – would suggest workplace absenteeism rates of up to 18 per cent might also have something to do with historic logjams at airports, cancelled or delayed flights, and an overwhelmed baggage handling system. Yet this would explain only part of the considerable problem facing the airline. Joyce was not willing to get into the rest of it.

“I say these days that it is a wonder they can get a plane off the ground,” one source familiar with the 15-year-long restructuring effort at Qantas tells The Saturday Paper.

“It’s a complete mess and my honest belief is that they just do not care about providing a good-quality service anymore. They are impervious to public scrutiny and criticism. A new crisis is just another day’s work to them.”

Since 2008, when he took the reins as Qantas chief executive, Joyce has overseen a radical and at times crazy-brave strategy to refashion the airline, spending much of his tenure at war with the various unions that claim membership across different parts of the aviation industry. Since 2010, the size of the Qantas workforce has been cut by 13,700 workers, almost two-thirds of whom were terminated or forced out in the past two years of the pandemic.

“Joyce is a textbook example of everything wrong with modern-day corporate governance. He has taken vital national infrastructure, illegally outsourced jobs and cut the pay and conditions of those who remain, all to improve Qantas’s margins and boost his own pay at the expense of his workers and the travelling public.”

“It is really regrettable and it’s really disappointing for the Australian flying public that just when they want aviation to literally take off again, we’ve got airlines, and particularly Qantas, that just don’t seem to be match fit,” Transport Workers’ Union national secretary Michael Kaine tells The Saturday Paper.

“And it’s not match fit because it’s taken a long-term view about its workforce – that it should splinter it, that it should push it away from direct engagement, that it should pit aviation companies against one another. And that has resulted in standards in the aviation sector for workers being so low that just when we need to attract workers to the industry, they don’t want to come back because it’s not a desirable job any more.

“And, you know, that is on Qantas, and it’s on the Joyce administration.”

These are not minor historical squabbles. According to industry watchers and unions, the current failure of airlines to meet even basic flight standards must be understood in the context of Qantas’s domination of the sector and Joyce’s hardline approach to union-busting.

What the Irish Australian managed to do to 2000 Qantas ground-handlers at the end of 2020, under the cover of Covid-19, was the final stage of a plan he first set in motion in 2007. The airline had just negotiated a new enterprise agreement with the TWU regarding this “below the wing” workforce employed by the main business, Qantas Airways Limited (QAL). But rather than continue to hire baggage handlers under these more generous conditions, the company created a labour-hire subsidiary, titled Qantas Ground Services (QGS), with substantially lower wages and conditions, and then vowed to never hire another handler through QAL. It didn’t.

The November 2020 decision to outsource ground crews entirely finalised a Joyce dream: the new contracts with third-party operators such as Swissport and dnata provided ground services at the remaining 10 airports where Qantas still had its own employees, allowing the airline a “full exit”. Not even QGS was required anymore.

“Of course, that [2007 decision] kept the directly engaged workforce much more compliant and much, much less likely to ask for better terms and conditions lest they end up on the labour-hire terms,” Kaine says.

“And then when that wasn’t enough, they started a program of outsourcing – that is, completely severing the relationship between their workforce and the company, pushing the work to a plethora of other companies, some of which have very low standards both in terms of industrial relations and safety.

“But these [third-party] companies are entities over which Qantas has incredible commercial sway, commercial power and the capacity to essentially dictate to them what they will be willing to pay for labour.”

In early May, the Federal Court found that the airline’s decision to rid itself of 2000 baggage handlers was taken illegally because a high-level team of executives deliberately timed the move to avoid industrial action from the TWU. Airline executives in the group management committee had discussed a “vanishing window of opportunity” to pursue a complete exit from ground handling. It was the only option truly considered by the company because it would save $103 million annually and, if pursued properly, was high risk but high reward.

Then chief operating officer Paul Jones made voice memos to this effect, noting that the enterprise agreements governing the workers subject to outsourcing would be “open” from December 2020. On the stand, the primary judge noted he was clearly uncomfortable giving evidence.

“That [voice] document was not referred to in Mr Jones’s affidavit, but made the subject of cross-examination in which he was observed by his Honour to be uncomfortable, and his manner unpersuasive,” Federal Court judges Bromberg, Rangiah and Bromwich noted in dismissing appeals.

“The conclusion his Honour reached was that Mr Jones was feigning a lack of recollection as to what was in his mind when he made the annotations which went directly to the issue of the reasons for the outsourcing decision, casting doubt on his evidence on that topic more generally.

“Mr Jones was found to be willing to fashion his evidence to suit what he perceived to be the forensic advantage to Qantas Airways, and therefore his Honour did not consider it safe to place any significant reliance upon that evidence.”

Qantas continues to deny that it acted inappropriately in pursuing the measures, and has announced it will seek to appeal against the Federal Court decision in the High Court.

On the record, Qantas says the Easter chaos at airports had nothing to do with the outsourcing of ground handlers. People were sick, it says, and besides: there is a global shortage of labour in the aviation sector and similar issues have occurred around the world. Certainly, all major airlines suffered at Easter.

Earlier this month, Virgin Australia passengers endured yet more queues over the Queen’s Birthday long weekend. Qantas passengers continued to be parted from their luggage, for days at a time in some cases.

The difference between the two, perhaps, is that Virgin Australia chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka was at least aware of the consequences of cutting too far and too deep.

“The aviation industry risks being materially delayed in its recovery and forced to downsize while demand is significantly depressed and then rehire and retrain when it ramps up, and the implications of that for the economy are going to be significant,” she told a senate inquiry into the future of the aviation industry post-Covid in January last year. “The consequences that will have with respect to fares and accessibility will also be felt by people in the regions, and they will be significant.”

One Qantas traveller, emblematic of many, spent more than $500 to replace items needed for a business trip, after an inbound flight was delayed by more than six hours. On Thursday, philosophy PhD candidate Eleanor Gordon-Smith tweeted that QF8 was cancelled without warning at 2am at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. There were no hotels or transport available. Indeed, there were no Qantas staff at all.

“A planeload of people is at checkin with nowhere to go and no guidance,” she said. “The Qantas desk isn’t just unmanned it has become a Lufthansa desk … “No texts, phone calls, no updates on Google. The flight has disappeared from the internet.

“I’ve flown Qantas exclusively for 20 years and loved them but you leave 300 people in an airport at 2am where there’s no food on site, no hotel vouchers and not one staff member turns up at the time you said to board? Fuck Qantas.”

The executive director of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Brynn O’Brien, was also meant to be on QF8.

“My flight of 200+ people … has been stuck at dallas, delayed overnight, with no update for 15+ hours. almost as if sacking loads of engineers and ground staff is … bad,” she tweeted on Thursday. “Qantas isn’t what it used to be and i reckon the way the company treated (/continues to treat) staff during the pandemic is a pretty good clue as to why.”

Qantas later apologised “for the inconvenience”.

While all airlines are suffering during the extraordinary conditions of the pandemic, former TWU boss and now federal Labor senator Tony Sheldon says Qantas has led the sector into decline.

“In less than 15 years, Alan Joyce has trashed a century-old Australian institution,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “Joyce’s dismantling of Qantas has compromised the capacity and performance of the entire Australian aviation industry. Now the travelling public are paying the price.”

Sheldon says Qantas has treated those who made it great, such as check-in staff, baggage handlers, engineers, pilots, cabin crew and other frontline staff “with utter contempt”.

“Joyce is a textbook example of everything wrong with modern-day corporate governance. He has taken vital national infrastructure, illegally outsourced jobs and cut the pay and conditions of those who remain, all to improve Qantas’s margins and boost his own pay at the expense of his workers and the travelling public,” he says. “Joyce’s complete abrogation of responsibility is matched only by the Qantas board, which inexplicably continues to back him.”

Privately, Qantas argues that getting rid of its baggage handlers couldn’t have had an impact on services because there were no issues at Easter last year, a month after the final workers had left the company.

Of course, last year the world’s borders were not fully open and Qantas handled just 22,684 international passengers. The most recently available data, from March, showed the carrier flew 126,332 passengers overseas in addition to the ballooning domestic market.

Australian Services Union assistant national secretary Emeline Gaske tells The Saturday Paper the airline, which received about $2 billion in taxpayer support during Covid-19, “used the pandemic as cover to outsource, offshore and disinvest in the local workforce, meaning it is a shell of its former self, with insufficient staffing to deliver a quality service”.

“Cuts to service and staff mean that Qantas customers, like its workforce, feel taken for granted and are losing faith in the airline,” she said.

“They have an opportunity to rebuild that trust, but it will require a U-turn in corporate policy, with a reinvestment in the local workforce, bringing jobs back onshore, and renewing the service model that was so successful for so long. The alternative is to continue down the path of a budget carrier.”

During the chaos of the past three months, Qantas has been forced to ask administrative staff and senior executives to “volunteer” to head into the airport to personally help short-staffed customer service teams deal with irate passengers.

As lost baggage rooms at major airports overflowed, these managers – some on $200,000 a year – were given the job of arranging overflowing bags in alphabetical order in the arrival halls. Qantas has had to cancel entire flights because they could not get enough pilots to fly them. At one point, the airline had to fly a jet filled with lost baggage and no paying passengers interstate, just so the bags could be reunited with customers. Call centre wait times have swelled to eight hours in some cases, after Qantas sent about 900 of its 1000 call centre jobs overseas to South Africa and Fiji. Those offshore workers do not have access to the reservation system used by the 100 or so call centre workers in Hobart. Frantic calls for help are often re-routed, leading to those extreme wait times. Unless, of course, a caller is a gold frequent flyer or higher; they get sent straight to the Hobart team.

“It’s an implicit recognition that Qantas knows the service it provides is better in Hobart than in the vast majority of its offshore centres,” a source says.

While the airline points to a global labour shortage, it struggles to articulate the nexus between declining conditions and a workforce that simply cannot support itself. As one Qantas employee told this newspaper, a ground handler at an outsourced company earns about $22 an hour compared with a family member who earns $27 at a cafe.

If there were any expectations Qantas heard these concerns and was willing to act on them, or that it understood the concerns of a travelling public paying more for less, those hopes were extinguished in October last year during a hearing of the senate select committee on job security.

There, Labor’s Tony Sheldon asked Qantas general counsel Andrew Finch if the corporation requires that contractors engaged by the airline pay their employees a living wage.

Finch was deadpan in his response: “What’s a living wage?”

Qantas did not respond to a series of detailed questions sent by The Saturday Paper.

It wasn’t the only airline affected by the IT problem, which also grounded the planes of some competitors.

Yet it was Qantas who fielded the public flak for failing to manage the “nightmare queues” that resulted. There was a queue from Melbourne airport’s Qantas domestic terminal that reached as far as the international terminal. As stranded passengers tried to frantically rebook flights, it was the Qantas service desk that was overwhelmed.

If there’s one word you don’t want to marry to your brand in the anxious, emotional world of the commercial passenger experience, it’s “chaos”. Yet chaos has come to define the passenger experience of Australia’s once-vaunted national carrier, as well as to offer a textbook lesson in corporate unaccountability and the failures of privatisation.

Once upon a time, Qantas’s reputation for quality was such that it drove a major plot point in a Hollywood movie. In 1988’s Rain Man, Tom Cruise is obliged to drive his autistic brother on a life-changing journey across America because the only airline Dustin Hoffman’s character will fly is the matchless – and unavailable – Qantas. So shamed were other airlines by the comparison, they used to cut the key scene when the film played on their inflight entertainment.

Local audiences cheered the scene when that movie came out. These days one imagines the same locals erupting in harrumphs, or throwing their boots at the screen.

Because if it’s not queues from IT glitches at Qantas, it’s queues from delayed baggage transfers, cancelled flights, a lack of staff, a generalised, spiralling cluelessness that drives operational dysfunction and frustration. This publication reported that as many as one in 10 pieces of luggage every day are either getting lost or not being loaded on to Qantas domestic flights at Sydney airport.

A spokesperson for Qantas said this claim was “completely inaccurate” but has declined to provide its own figures on mishandled baggage.

Understandably, frequent flyers are not risking lost hold luggage and are travelling with carry-on items, for which there is not enough room on packed flights. It transforms every Qantas boarding experience into a game that combines sardines and Tetris in the worst, most unpunctual way.

Since becoming Qantas CEO in 2008, Alan Joyce has distinguished himself in the Australian corporate community for the brutal enthusiasm with which he’s engaged corporate tactics at the company. It was Joyce who infamously stranded thousands of Qantas passengers around the world in 2011 when he grounded the entire fleet in a fit of pique at an industrial dispute.

Nevermind that it was not aggressive industrial policy but – as Alan Kohler pointed out at the time – a drop in fuel prices that funded Qantas’s profit in dire trouble’s wake. Joyce was named “most influential business leader” of that year by The Australian and, sadly, notoriety seemed to encourage him.

During the pandemic the grounding of airlines saw Qantas receive $2bn of bailout money from the then Morrison government.

The government demanded no equity in exchange for its largesse, and Qantas management gave no reassurances, either – not about jobs, routes, services or quality. While milking the taxpayer teat for two-thirds of the value of the company, Qantas management did not maintain jobs.

Instead, they sacked its unionised ground staff, exploiting a “window of opportunity” when workers weren’t physically at work and therefore unable to bargain. In late 2019 they unlawfully sacked 2,000 baggage handlers, cleaners, aircraft towing crews and other ground crew whose professionalism is now so desperately missed.

The money was instead spent on crushing Qantas’s competition. The company replaced its fleet of planes, bought out a potential rival, undercut another rival, actively lobbied the government to withhold bailouts for Virgin, and spent what was left on funding the legal cost of their unlawful behaviour and paying out lush executive bonuses.

So if you’re wondering why Qantas seems unbothered by customer outrage at its poor product offering, understand that crushing rivals allows Qantas management to run our once proud national airline without the threat of competition obliging the company to lift standards. Emboldened, management have doubled down against the staff, cancelling staff agreements as a bargaining tactic to cut wages and also cutting wages by using a “sign on bonus” after threatening to put people on minimum awards.

Dare I ask: what do we expect? Those with rosy, Rain Man recollections of the Qantas brand need to be reminded that the airline was privatised between 1992 and 1995. It was a mistake made by the Hawke-Keating Labor government and one that the Albanese Labor government should heed whenever corporate raiders suggest a critical piece of national infrastructure go on sale.

Because the corporate mission of Qantas isn’t anything so twee as to “transport people” or things or “facilitate the service of travel”. The first line of their strategy is: “To achieve top quartile Total Shareholder Returns (TSR) relative to the ASX 100 and global airline peers.”

Unsurprisingly, calls for the re-nationalisation of Qantas are growing. Waiting for another delayed flight, in an oversized queue, Australians are lining up to join them.

The milestone took place on 13 October at the company's Philadelphia production facility in the US, and saw aircraft AC5 perform an initial in-flight evaluation of its systems and general handling.

As noted by Leonardo, AC5 will be retained by Leonardo contributing to customer demonstrations, mission capability evaluation and expansion, and supporting the manufacturer and the operators in the transition from the developmental to the operational phase once on the market.

AC5 now joins one US- and two Italian-based prototype AW609 aircraft that are all involved in the final stages of testing activities ahead of US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification. Production aircraft for three customers are on the final assembly line at various stages of construction in Philadelphia. Leonardo said customers signed up to date comprise Bristow Group and “an undisclosed long-established European operator of Leonardo's helicopters”, while no details were provided for the third undisclosed customer.

In terms of military customers, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in 2015 for three aircraft to be used by the country's Joint Aviation Command (JAC) for search-and-rescue (SAR) duties. The UAE platforms were scheduled to be delivered by 2019, but to date no contract has been signed (or at least announced).

An Italian Army white paper from 2015 included a tiltrotor aircraft for rapid troop-transport and medical evacuation duties for which the AW609 could be a candidate (the only other option being the much larger and more expensive Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey), but again there has been no contract signed.