Opinion: Game, set and match for Qantas’ reputation

The Flying Kangaroo started 2024 with another double fault. Can it finally win a set?

I’ve always loved the tennis term ‘unforced error’, described in the dictionary proper as a “mistake in play attributed to one’s own failure rather than to the skill or effort of one’s opponent”. Urban Dictionary – the cult website that publishes colloquial definitions – puts it rather more eloquently as a “polite way of saying that someone has screwed up royally, creating a crisis not because of events out of their control but through their own tactless decisions”. Enter Qantas, which, clearly bored of not upsetting the public for several weeks, decided to start the new year by smashing a return into the ball girl’s face with its atrocious new safety video.

Airlines have, to be fair, been sassing up their onboard tutorials for a while, ever since Virgin Atlantic began the trend in 2007. The Flying Kangaroo’s video, though, decided to go one step funkier by shooting the entire thing without – at any point – featuring an actual aircraft. Something that made the actual safety aspect of the safety video hard to follow. To make matters worse, it came days after Japan Airlines’ own, stripped back, version was hailed for helping hundreds of passengers escape the burning wreckage of an A350 before it exploded in Tokyo.