Boeing 737 crash gives Alan Milne ‘mandate for change’ at Air Niugini

In the wake of its first fatal crash in 45 years, Air Niugini is about to get a Qantas-style makeover.

Allan Milne worked for Qantas for 36 years.

In the wake of its first fatal crash in 45 years, Air Niugini is about to get a Qantas-style makeover at the hands of new chief executive Alan Milne.

By his own admission, Mr Milne knows no other way than the Qantas “safety and compliance” way, having worked for the airline for the 36 years since he left school.

Starting off as an engineer, Mr Milne rose through the ranks of the flying kangaroo to head up a variety of areas including engineering, integrated operations and most recently, fuel and environment.

The 54-year-old said it was the realisation that “executive manager” was the peak of his career with Qantas that convinced him to answer a job ad for Air Niugini CEO.

“I seriously never thought I’d get the opportunity (to run an airline),” Mr Milne said.

“Airline CEOs throughout the world are a small group of people.”

It helped that Air Niugini seemed like a perfect fit for Mr Milne after his long career with Qantas.

“It’s reasonably geographically close to Australia and the size of the airline is perfect, with 25 aeroplanes and about 2000 staff,” he said.

“It truly is a national flag carrier and Papua New Guineans are very passionate about their airline.” Although he had not yet taken the reins of Air Niugini when one of the airline’s Boeing 737s crashed at Chuuk on September 28, Mr Milne said the tragedy did not trigger any second thoughts about taking the job.

“Absolutely not — in fact quite the opposite,” he said.

“I’ve had a fair bit of experience with crisis management, running the Qantas operations centre during a few of the situations that we had, and I thought ‘I can help in this situation’.”

He said there would be much to learn from the incident, and he would do whatever “needed to be done differently to make sure it never happens again”.

“If I needed a mandate for change in the organisation this would be it,” Mr Milne said. As well as bringing Qantas’s high and uncompromising safety standards to the role, the new chief executive said he wanted to work on rebuilding the Air Niugini brand and staff morale.

“They’ve been really shocked by the accident and are still struggling with how to cope with it,” he said.