For Virgin Australia staff, it’s been a rocky road – and not the sort paved with chocolate and marshmallows – since management called in administrators two years ago and the airline was reborn under the ownership of private equity barbarians Bain Capital.

As the largest cohort of creditors, Virgin employees, remember, were implored to vote in favour of Bain’s takeover, and 99 per cent of them did so after Bain boss Mike Murphy offered this unambiguous assurance: “Virgin has a great management team run by Paul Scurrah, and I’d like to again reaffirm that we are backing Paul to successfully lead Virgin through the current turbulence and back into the skies.”