Moving beyond Covid-19: Cathay Pacific wrestles with uncertainty, hard choices, as it prepares to fly again
- Staffing, flights, destinations under scrutiny as Cathay draws up plan for long, slow recovery
- Airline carrying out biggest overhaul in its history looks for a way back from record losses
The airline’s bloated staff structure needed fixing from top to bottom, with concerns growing over staff costs, particularly pilots’ pay.
The result included slashing layers of duplication and expensive managers, introducing less lucrative pay packages for Hong Kong-based pilots, a hiring blitz for less costly foreign cockpit crew outside the city, and moving business units to locations with lower labour and office costs.
Those reforms sowed the seeds of strained labour relations and a more combative workforce that dogged the airline for decades, but also ensured profitability until 2017, outside of major global crises.
Tang, now 61 and chief executive officer, is likely to draw on that experience as the Cathay group embarks on what may well be the biggest overhaul in its 73-year history as it prepares for a post-pandemic world.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought international air travel to a standstill, crippling airlines globally, with Cathay itself losing a record HK$9.87 billion (US$1.27 billion) in the first six months of 2020.