Talk:Air New Zealand

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Assessment comments

Today I moved several things into a new heading "Onwards into the future". The changes that I've put under this heading, show what's happening now in the evolutionary process of the airline.

Perhaps the section on Airpoints should be split off into it's own page ?

Best Regards

--Ntddevsys --Ntddevsys 08:16, 12 May 2006 (UTC)11:01, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] //

I should now add more detail to the pre-Ansett and post-Ansett sections, so as to balance the entry up. TEAL/Air New Zealand has a long history after all, and did a great deal more than just try to buy an airline bigger than itself and run out of money. Unfortunately, while I have good sources here on the Ansett disaster, and also on the Mount Erebus disaster, I don't have much on the early years.

The current write-up of the Mt Erebus crash, by the way, is good so far as it goes, but misses a crucial point: the Royal Commission was careful and exhaustive, but failed to properly understand that the primary rule of safety in aviation is the same primary rule that applies to ships at sea: the captain is at all times responsible for the safety of his vessel, no matter what other factors may intrude. This is why, for example, if a ship runs aground in a harbour entrance, it is regarded as the captain's fault, even though a marine pilot was in control at the time. It is a very harsh rule, but a very good rule. Essentially, it means that the aircraft captain is not just entitled to, but required to excercise his judgement, and take whatever action is needed to preserve his command - such as choosing not to fly into cloud at 2000 feet when not certain of the aircraft's exact position and knowing that there is a 12,000 foot mountain somewhere in the vicinity.

  • I disagree. The Airline's Navigation planning staff changed the programming for the guidance computer waypoints to take the aircraft directly over Mt. Erebus the immediately before the flight and after Captain Collins had plotted hs route on a map. The Captain was not alerted to the change in the computer flight plan by staff on the ground before takeoff. Also, the Captain had not previously been given an opportunity to travel on an orientation flight as an observer as was required by Civil Aviation regulations. Royal Commissioner Justice Peter Mahon, at the end of his book Verdict on Erebus, makes it clear that the Captain Collins' decision to continue to fly at 2000 feet under visual flying rules - apparently in clear air below the overcast and not in cloud - towards a mountain - was probably because the mountain was in white out conditions and could not be seen. The Captain can not be held responsible for things he is not advised of or trained for - such as changed flight plans and poor training. The coverup by the company afterwards made understanding what went wrong all the more difficult. Captain Collins, an apparently careful pilot, exercised his judgement to the best of his abilities. The plane crashed because the Captain based his judgement on navigation information that was changed without his knowledge and a polar whiteout condition that he was unfamiliar with and had not been trained to recognise, caused a 12,000 foot mountain to appear to be flat land that could be safely flown over. Yes the Captain flew the plane towards the mountain, he did so because he could not see it, was not expecting it there and was not trained to recognise conditions that would make mountains disappear from view. I think the Royal Commission understood the Captain's responsibility very well and identified that under these circumstances he was not responsible for the crash, as the crash was not due to decisions the Captain made.

None of this invalidates the other findings of the inquiry, of course. Nevertheless, there was considerable concern expressed in aviation safety circles that the Erebus Royal Commission finding placed at risk the longstanding doctrine of command responsibility.

Wikipedia should not present misleading information and omit pertinent fact. The current entry is misleading where it says the Privy Council "overturned his findings". It most certainly did not overturn his findings, only some of them. Justice Mahon's finding that the crew was blameless was not overturned, a fact which is important in the context of the enquiry, I am amending the page accordingly to give an accurate, NPOV, account. Moriori 23:52, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC)
Why doesnt all this argument go into the talk page in the article about the crash itself? Antonio Hard as a Pole Martin 3:02, Jun 10, 2004 (MST)

I agree with Antonio's question! Robin Patterson 00:03, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Now after some addition of headings etc to the "early" history I hope some of you younsters can

  • move the koru paragraph out of the history
  • similarly tidy up the later history; possibly blending it with the last part of the pre-koru section

Robin Patterson 00:03, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Current Fleet?

Should the current fleet include types on order, and not yet operated? Shouldn't that be in a separate, 'on order' section? Bombardier Q300, Boeing 777, Boeing 7E7 are the ones affected by this...

[edit] Out of date statements

In the section "New Longhaul Product", in the second para from the end, there are a couple of things that will happen (dates subject to change) in Aug and Sept 2005. Please reword the paragraph to reflect that those dates are long past, and these events presumably happened or plans changed.-gadfium 02:01, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Subsidary Carriers/etc

I dont beleive that Freedom Air's aircraft should come under NZ's fleet details. NZ's link airlines (Eagle, Nelson & Mt Cook) operate their aircraft under NZ's AOC, where SJ have their own... any thoughts? --Pepith 05:33, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IATA Code

The TE IATA code lasted many years after the airline was renamed from TEAL. Does anyone know when this was changed?

[edit] Grounding of DC-10s

The Air New Zealand Flight 901 suggests that Air New Zealand may have replaced its DC-10s with Boing 747s due to that disaster. I thought the decision had more to do with the grounding of all DC-10s for five weeks in 1979. That was a huge event for Air New Zealand as all their major international flights were grounded. I don't see any coverage of the grounding on Wikipedia except for a very brief mention at McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Safety_record. I think this was rather a significant event in the history of Air New Zealand, so perhaps someone with more knowledge than me could add it to the article.-gadfium 08:02, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disproporionate coverage of Ansett debacle

I wonder whether this should have it's own page? (under my breath, I add with links to pages about the Australian Apple exporters "fire blight" fiction, Australian Banks tax arrangements in New Zealand, the ANZAC frigate purchase, the Chappell brothers and other fine instances of trans-Tasman understanding :-)) Winstonwolfe 06:16, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I aggree. I read the page from top to bottom and almost lost interest during the ansett debacle. sure it was an anz owned subsidary but there is a lot of infomation there that simply doesn't pertain to anz. i am going to come back on this in 1 week.
I agree. Put in a summary of the Ansett debacle, and create a separate page for it. Randomkiwi 02:51, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
I wholly agree with the disproportionate coverage in this article in relation to the demise of Ansett in relation to AirNZ. Any action regarding a new article to cover this needs to be undertaken in concert with updates to the Ansett Australia article as they both talk about the same information. I'd be happy to assist with this process. Until then, I have noted the need for significant citations within the AirNZ article regarding this and the relevant template block at the top of the article. thewinchester 14:32, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
Thank you all - I'll leave this a while longer to see if anyone disagrees, and then create a new page, cutting and pasting the present material into it, and creating a paragraph summary int eh present article, (this is likely to be contentious too - thoughts on it welcome). Anyone else willing to do the job also welcome :-) Winstonwolfe 01:50, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hong Kong hub?

Article lede currently mentions additional hub to AKL at LAX; does HKG need now to be added (or LAX deleted since no more of a hub than LAX?)...Gaimhreadhan(kiwiexile at DMOZ) • 08:35, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sex Discrimination Controversy

This new section is about a relatively minor episode in the airline's history, and the policies for which Air New Zealand has been criticised are also the policies of Qantas, and perhaps of many other airlines. Is this undue weight? The incident could be folded into the history section. The section is also incomplete. What did the Human Rights Commissioner have to say about the matter? Did Air New Zealand change its policy as a result?-gadfium 19:12, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I feel this section warrants deletion- perhaps 50% of all airlines have this policy- it's just not publicised. 70.173.122.123 (talk)alex —Preceding comment was added at 15:18, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I fully agree with the above comments- I used to work for an Asian airline that had this same policy- it's just not openly discussed. As said above, at least 50% of airlines have this policy whether one likes it or not and therefore the paragraph should be deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.173.119.193 (talk) 20:05, 22 March 2008 (UTC) 70.173.119.193 (talk)ETA —Preceding comment was added at 20:08, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Split to Airline sex discrimination policy‎.-gadfium 18:44, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Overall criticisms of the article

I find the whole article a bit lengthy and without sensible weight being given to each aspect of the airline. I think it might be better to split off the excellent history section into its own article, and trim back the Airpoints and Services sections. Most of the Airpoints section is not specific to Air New Zealand and could be merged into Star Alliance or just dropped as not being of encyclopaedic value. The explanation of the different classes in Services looks like an advertisement. The blow-by-blow account of new and discontinued routes is not necessary.-gadfium 19:11, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I have just split the history section off to History of Air New Zealand and will work on it there. I have written a two-sentence overview of the history in this article with a link to the history page; feel free to update this as necessary. Blair - Speak to me 06:12, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
Good work. The summary needs to be expanded into a few solid paragraphs.-gadfium 07:08, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I'll work on that once I've finished working on the history article (that way I'll have a better view for what the summary should contain). Blair - Speak to me 07:37, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
As you may have noticed I have split out the Airpoints article. My apologies, I didn't notice that there were discussion about this -- but I see there was discussion in favour of splitting it out anyway. Hopefully the split out of the Airpoints information helps reduce the overall clutter -- although I think there is a lot of work to do. Perhaps for the fleet information etc, we could just remove the historical data (except for siginficant stuff) and just keep the most recent data and divert any interesting historical fleet-related stuff into the History article. James Pole 01:56, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
My airpoints article has been tagged for deletion. I'm happy to merge the article back into here if it is required. Please do discuss whether this should be done or just leave the Airpoints article as a separate article as it is at the moment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by James.pole (talk • contribs) 08:23, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Effort Needed

I have been monitoring this article for a very long time now and I think it is time that we actually fix it all up. What we need to do is firstly get more references. We have something like 6 at the moment. Very slack. Other pages have around 25. That will take the major problem off our hands as that has been the major problem for the last year or so.

Secondly we need to look at HOW we are writing this article. We have been told it is turning out like an advertisment. Can we please make an effort to write this as an article about the airline, not trying to gain customers for the airline.

Finally can we please try and cut down on the external pages e.g. See (link). Can we try and almost just have those pages there as extra reading. We need to extract the crucial information from those pages and put them into the main Air New Zealand Page. Then at the bottom of the page at the 'See Also' section, we can put the links for the pages there.

Overall we just need to give this page a good tidy up and keep it up to date WITH RESOURCES. Little things like the total of ANZ's fleet. Little things like that aswell as the big things.

I myself am a proud Kiwi and would like to see this article clear of messages so I will do my best to clean it up as long as others try aswell. 210.7.19.21 00:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm with you on that. I've been working on the History of Air New Zealand article which I recently split off from the main article due to its length. Its progressing reasonably when I get the time (its getting near final exams at uni and so I can be a bit busy). I'll also see what I can do with the main article. Blair - Speak to me 00:17, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm not particularly happy that the history is a separate page. Surely the historically important stuff is what belongs in the main article and the trivially unimportant crap like Koru Clubs, Airpoints, and etc. could be spun off? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.238.248.86 (talk) 12:09, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Personally, I think the history is long enough that a separate history article is warranted, but I think there should also be a good but concise summary of the history in the main article. People should be able to get a rough idea of the airline's history from the main article, and then go to the separate article if they want all the details. Just my opinion, of course. -- Vardion 06:01, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Thank you all very much for your efforts. This page is looking fantastic now and the number of sources are starting to rise. Keep up the good work! 125.238.106.19 23:59, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Controversy section

While the three issues discussed in the section named Controversial Topics may have been newsworthy at the time, I'm not sure they're important enough in the larger scheme of things to warrant a whole section in this article, are they? The Qantas alliance proposal seems more appropriate for the History of Air New Zealand article, since it's not a current issue, and the same might be said for the outsourcing of maintenance issue (although we don't seem to cover other employment issues, such as the jobs going to Fiji and the current dispute with the SFWU). As for the sex discrimination controversy — it made the headlines, sure, but then faded from view almost immediately, and doesn't seem to have had any lasting effect on anything. Overall, I feel that giving these three controversies a full section in the main Air NZ article rather overstates their overall importance to the topic. (That might just be my opinion, though). -- Vardion (talk) 22:01, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Move the first two to the history article, and perhaps condense them. Just delete the sex discrimination controversy - it looks as though this is/was a policy of many airlines, and is not specific to Air New Zealand. If someone thinks it's worth keeping, they can create an article which deals with the issue across airlines.-gadfium 05:43, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Do not delete the sex discrimination controversy please - this is hugely significant for a number of reasons. Firstly - Air New Zealand and Qantas effectively broke the story and are the main companies under investigation here. Some airlines have similar policies, but Air NZ, Qantas and BA seem to have by far the strictest and most offensive policies. Virgin Atlantic for example have no ban whatsoever, staff are just told to use common sense (and therefore presumably are concerned with both male and female abusers) http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:U_ONJ32Tfr8J:www.vaeter-aktuell.de/english/British_Airways_-_Men_cannot_sit_with_lone_children_2001.pdf+%22British+Airways%22+men+sitting+next+to+children&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shakehandsman (talk • contribs) 05:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

It still seems that this would best be made a separate article, rather than having very similar content in this article, at Qantas and at British Airways. It would be appropriate for each airline article to link to the new article.-gadfium 08:12, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Any such article would merely add much more detail to the issue and allow for more quotes, and updated information etc. The issue would still need to be covered here too as it is of such significance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shakehandsman (talk • contribs) 16:25, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I've split it out to Airline sex discrimination policy‎, since there were several people who considered it better split or outright deleted, and one person who wanted it kept in each article. The new article could do with updated material.-gadfium 18:44, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry but you are completely wrong to suggest I'm the only person who thinks such matter need to stay in the main article for each airline - this topic has been discussed in the British Airways talk page too - if you'd have read that you would have come to a different conclusion. On top of that each time someone has attempted to remove the controversy from the BA article it has generally been a different user who reverted the unwarrented changes. As I stated before we do need one article for discussing the issue in detail so many thanks for putting the work in to create that - but it still needs to remain on the airlines own pages as well. --Shakehandsman (talk) 01:13, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
As far as I can see on Talk:British Airways, there was a discussion between five people, three for and two against. There was also one who wanted better sourcing. That's hardly enough to make me draw a different conclusion. The consensus here was clearly for removal. However, I suggest we keep a trimmed down version here, with a {{main}} link to the split off article. Please consider improving and bringing the split article up to date. At the moment, it looks as though there was a minor fuss at the time, and then everyone forgot about it. Actually, I think that's probably accurate. If there are no updates to the article, we should move the link to it to the History of Air New Zealand.-gadfium 04:03, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
There were 7 people discussing the article - 3 for deletion of the controversy, 3 against and one who thought it just need to be better sourced. I.e. there was no consensus whatsoever for deletion. In terms of wanting a more reliable source for information, this was provided in the form of a link to a Times newspaper article from 2001 thus that matter is completely settled. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Shakehandsman (talk • contribs) 23:37, 29 March 2008 (UTC)