Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka lands back at the controls

New Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka has revealed how she plans to turn the airline into a global success story.

Jayne Hrdlicka at Brisbane airport on Wednesday, her first day as CEO at Virgin Australia. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

The year 2020 was supposed to be the year Jayne Hrdlicka spent travelling with her husband, after an ­intense few decades of corporate life.

Instead, the former Jetstar CEO has found herself back at the helm of an airline, and she is almost at a loss to explain why.

“Obviously the world turned upside down and one thing leads to another and I’m back in aviation,” Ms Hrdlicka told The Australian on her first day as Virgin Australia CEO.

“It was a real drawcard to help make sure Virgin’s hugely successful on the other side of this. It has all the potential to be one of the most significant success ­stories in the aviation industry globally and it’s a great honour to be part of it.”

With a reputation for discipline, directness and steely resolve, Ms Hrdlicka is aware of the perceived differences between herself and the man she replaced, Paul Scurrah.

But she is adamant having “a good constructive relationship with stakeholders” is more important than popularity, with tough decisions needed to build a resilient airline.

“It was a decade of decisions that put the business in a bad place,” said Ms Hrdlicka of Virgin Australia, which went into administration in April with debts in excess of $7bn.

“We had no chance of surviving COVID or a big cash problem or a big fuel problem. We didn’t have the resilience as a business to navigate the normal challenges that come in aviation.”

With new owner Bain Capital in place, having committed $3.5bn to the airline, Ms Hrdlicka said Virgin Australia’s fortunes had changed dramatically.

Bain had developed a 10-year plan for the airline to see it through COVID and then on to bigger and better things in the longer term.

“We’ve got this beautiful new chapter to write now with the benefit of administration, and not many airlines make it through administration,” Ms Hrdlicka said.

“This is the first one ever in Australia’s history and we’re really excited about the possibilities now because we’ve been able to fix a lot of the issues and the challenges that weren’t fixable without the benefit of administration.”

She dismissed criticism of private equity firms as “misplaced”, pointing out that very few people around the world would invest in an airline at the moment, particularly one in a market that was “closing borders left, right and centre”. Like others in the travel industry, Ms Hrdlicka is aghast at the piecemeal response across the country to COVID management and added her voice to calls for a national approach.

“We need to figure out how to live with COVID and keep our borders open in a way that is safe and healthy and leverages technology and relies on people to do the right thing,” she said.

“We need a national plan, and everybody signed up to it. We need a better plan for inbound international. There’s fantastic news on vaccinations and that’s very uplifting, but it’s going to take a long time to roll that out and how long is it feasible to lock ourselves off from the rest of the world and lock ourselves off from each other?”

The upcoming December-January holiday period was especially important, not just to the airline industry as a significant source of revenue, but to the broader community, Ms Hrdlicka said.

“It’s just part of our lifestyle and people can’t plan,” she said.

“They want to spend time with their families but they don’t know whether they can bank on it. It’s a devastating blow to the basic expectations most of us have.”

Once life did return to some sort of normality, Virgin Australia would face other challenges, most significantly from Qantas.

The airline group under Alan Joyce has typically performed ruthlessly in pursuit of market share, adding capacity on routes to crush rivals and using Jetstar to undercut fares.

Having spent nine years working for the Qantas Group, Ms Hrdlicka was unfazed, happily confirming that the two airline groups were “very” different.

“This business [Virgin] was built from fantastic entrepreneurial foundations. In my first week of getting to know people in the business, one of the first phone calls was from Richard Branson wanting to say hello and welcome,” Ms Hrdlicka said.

“This business has always been a very special airline in the hearts of Australians, and that’s not going to change.”