Well it's aviation on the front and aviation on the back – News Corp's Alan Joyce-hater Miranda Devine will be chucking ashtrays this morning!
While Joyce is channelling Reservoir Dogs (Harvey Keitel to Marc Newson's Tim Roth), archrival John Borghetti was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in Thursday's Australia Day honours list.
The award is timed nicely, with Borghetti at the top of descent at Virgin Australia after nearly seven years at the helm. Chairman Elizabeth Bryan's thinking is well advanced vis-à-vis management succession. The airline's line manager, industry veteran John Thomas, remains Borghetti's most likely replacement, though there is no shortage of outsiders jostling for the board's attention.
Chief among them is the Crown Prince of Etihad, James Hogan, whose board announced his impending departure from the UAE national carrier on Tuesday.
Not so long ago, Hogan, a Melbourne native and former Ansett trolley dolly, coveted the top job at Qantas – back when Joyce looked unlikely to survive a series of strategic thought bubbles and a sea of red ink.
How the tables have turned. Joyce now has Qantas spitting out cash like a faulty ATM while Etihad – like its Gulf siblings (even the most commercial of them, Emirates, is desperately pulling in its belt – is flying empty planes to and from a fake metropolis buggerised by the structural decline of crude oil-related industry. The mind boggles at just how many tens of billions of Nayan family wealth has been flushed.
As Bryan well knows, after hurried growth under Borghetti, Virgin needs to start generating sufficient returns on its invested capital. And having never in his long career ever run a commercially-obliged (let alone profitable) aviation business, Hogan has as much chance of replacing Borghetti at Virgin as he did of seizing Joyce's chair at Mascot.
Another keen bean – rumour has it – is former Qantas executive Simon Hickey, now running student accommodation trust Campus Living and who can claim much credit for the exponential prosperity of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. Still, Thomas remains the unbackable favourite.
