Yeah. Some of us seem to think that we know how to run an airline.
Getting a bit off topic, but the funny thing is we probably do... except for a few major pain points, and one of them is finance.
There aren't many of us... heck, I'll almost wager none of us... who would know how to run an airline but be able to do so at a profit for years and years on end. We all know what things are supposed to be of value to an airline, but many of these are non-monetary things. We'd either be running the airline financially into the ground, running it out of financial security or clashing against the investors / shareholders.
And yes, I'm well aware that there are some of us on this who run their own businesses, possibly quite significant ones (maybe not Qantas large, but more than a SME).
Ironically, I've sat in on a couple of airline focus groups (those random ones where the airlines send you an email to join for an evening or a day and it's usually lead by some outside company, incentivised with some free food or drink) and listened to the responses of a bunch of people around the table about ideas that they propose would benefit the company. Most of the ideas are taken from what they have experienced at other airlines. None of them were new. Yet they all agreed that the airline would benefit from being more innovative. The conclusion is that many people who think they could run an airline are probably not innovative themselves by a country mile,
or simply that, as Marco Pierre White has said, "we live in an era of refinement, not innovation".
