Questions of trust

Why safety must remain front and centre

My number one tip for starting an airline is to put safety front and centre,” wrote Alan Joyce in a public letter to 10-year-old Alex Jacquot who had written to the Qantas chief executive officer asking for advice on starting an airline. Joyce’s letter, dated February, was published by Qantas earlier in the day of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302, 62 kilometres after its takeoff from Addis Ababa.

At the time of writing, Qantas’s tweet of the boy’s letter and Joyce’s response had received nearly 30,000 retweets and more than 80,000 Likes. Joyce also discussed Project Sunrise and the future of passenger experience, but in the following days the primacy of safety came to dominate not just the industry, but the world’s news.