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1 Mar, 2014

Mayday: How Qantas went from national icon to corporate tragedy

It is a story of senior executives who felt like jilted lovers, prematurely leaving the airline with Avgas still in their veins, and still wanting to prove they had what it took to run an airline as complex as Qantas.

It is also the saga of the rise of a major challenger to Qantas’ once near-monopoly grip on domestic air travel and how it managed to find itself in an air fare war that became bloody and personal.

Qantas is a company of tribes at war with itself, and anyone who questions its strategy. It also is suffering from a case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf after so many years of warning that it was close to collapse unless the government bowed to its wishes. At one time, a phrase was coined by Dixon known as “constant-shock syndrome”.

Read the rest: Mayday: How Qantas went from national icon to corporate tragedy – Sydney Morning Herald.