Alan Joyce

Born in Dublin, Joyce worked for Aer Lingus and Ansett Australia before joining Qantas in 2000. As Qantas chief executive he pursued an extended program of cost reduction, restructuring and workforce change. In October 2011 he grounded the entire Qantas mainline fleet during an industrial dispute, an action that led the industrial tribunal to terminate the dispute and that drew widespread criticism. After a record loss in 2014 and a subsequent transformation program, Qantas reported what was then a record profit in 2016. Joyce chaired the International Air Transport Association in 2012–13, was a leading corporate supporter of the 2017 campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia, and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017.

Joyce's final years at Qantas were marked by sustained public, political and shareholder criticism of the airline's customer service, industrial relations and executive pay. Qantas's 2020 outsourcing of about 1,700 ground handling jobs was found to have contravened the Fair Work Act 2009, a finding upheld unanimously by the High Court of Australia in September 2023 and followed by a record $90 million penalty in 2025. In 2024 the Federal Court fined Qantas $100 million for misleading consumers by continuing to sell tickets for flights it had already decided to cancel. Joyce brought his retirement forward by two months and left the airline on 5 September 2023; in August 2024 the Qantas board withheld $9.26 million of his final remuneration following a governance review. He published a memoir, Alan Joyce: Riding the Jet Stream, in 2026.