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4:25 pm, September 1st, 2026 - No comments
Categories: Christopher Luxon, the praiseworthy and the pitiful, uncategorized -
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Christopher Luxon recently chose to put the boot into Air New Zealand after it had announced an after tax loss of $242 million in the past financial year.
From John Weekes at the Herald:
[Luxon] said it was a “pretty poor performance” and added: “It’s really up for them to explain what’s caused such a significant loss and also, more importantly, what are they going to do to build a better business?”
…
“They’re a company that stands alone. We expect them to be commercial, we expect them to deal with their issues and to solve their challenges.
“It’s clearly a very poor result. It’s clearly a very poor performance, even in the context of global aviation and other airlines as well.”
Rob Fyfe, who was Luxon’s predecessor as Air New Zealand Chief, said that Luxon’s comments were not cool.
He said this:
I don’t think it’s so cool as an ex-CEO to be commenting on the current CEO or his team … If I’m brutally honest, I suspect the engines that have been causing Air New Zealand so much grief are engines that … either it was Christopher or me that made the decision to buy them. I’d be the last one to be throwing any stones.”
Fyfe was onto something here.
Air New Zealand’s latest report states that “[t]he multi-year engine issues with the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines on our Boeing 787 fleet and Pratt & Whitney PW1100 engines on our narrowbody fleet contributed an estimated $190 million to the loss before taxation.”
This is a big chunk of Air New Zealand’s loss.
The background is that in 2014 Air New Zealand started to acquire Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines for its Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner airplanes. The engines developed problems from 2017 and caused severe disruption to Air New Zealand’s operations. Qantas chose General Electric GEnx-1B engines and did not suffer similar problems. Its latest result was a reasonably healthy profit.
Guess who was the Chief Executive of Air New Zealand at the time the decision to go with the Rolls Royce Engines?
It was none other than Christopher Luxon, old seven houses himself. He was Chief Executive from 2012 to 2019 and was Chief not only at the time the ill fated decision to go with the engines was made but also in dealing with the consequences after problems arose.
Normally I would not think this to be relevant but it appears to me that Luxon is the person best placed to explain what’s caused such a significant loss and what he did to build a better business. And he should wear his beliggerent punching down on Air New Zealand.
If he is looking for someone to blame the buck stops with him.
