Former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has spoken out about the “ghost flight” controversy that inconvenienced and infuriated many Australians during the Covid crisis.Mr Joyce appeared on 60 Minutes on Sunday night in an interview with Tracy Grimshaw, where he explored the countless ups and downs that occurred during his nearly 15 years at the helm of the “Spirit of Australia”.He retired as Qantas Group CEO in September 2023 and handed the reins to Vanessa Hudson at a time when the airline’s reputation had “been hit hard on several fronts”.Then, the corporate titan seemingly vanished.As Ms Grimshaw observed, it was like he went from “Alan everywhere suddenly to Alan nowhere”.Nowadays, he can be found ordering piccolos and puppuccinos while walking along the Sydney Harbour foreshore with husband Shane Lloyd and dog Milo.“After I left Qantas I agreed with my husband, Shane, that I wouldn’t work for a year,” Mr Joyce said. “Because the burden and the stress of all those years, particularly the Covid years, really I think had gotten to me.”Mr Joyce has spent a year writing a memoir, to be released on July 28, titled Riding the Jet Stream. In it, he explores the many ups and downs that occurred during his tenure at the airline, including his time guiding the airline through the biggest aviation crisis in our history.“Covid knocked us between the eyes and then it became about survival because at one stage we had 11 weeks of cash left before we were going bankrupt,” Mr Joyce said.“It was the most horrible period I’ve had in my entire career ‘cause you were making horrendous decisions to make sure the airlines survived.”During that time, mistakes were made that ended up costing the airline hundreds of millions in legal bills and penalties. That included the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) suing Qantas for misleading tens of thousands of passengers who purchased tickets for “ghost flights” that had actually been cancelled days or weeks prior. Mr Joyce revealed of the time, “We had over 400,000 passengers we were trying to re-accommodate through the call centres. It was in chaos.”He insists that “we thought that we were doing the right thing by the customer at the time”.He said the airline attempted to get passengers on flights “as close as proximate” to their booked flights but “gets that people were inconvenienced” due to missing important events. However, he insisted that commentary at the time that it was a “fee for no service” situation wasn’t true and that the airline acted with “good intent”.“Every domestic customer that booked travelled either on the same day, either an hour after the flight or before the flight, and 98 per cent of the international customers did,” he said.While Mr Joyce fought the ACCC and defended the “ghost flights” saga, his successor Ms Hudson agreed to a settlement and copped a $100 million fine.Grimshaw also took aim at what she called the “glacially” slow effort of the airline to refund billions of dollars in cancelled flights when Covid first hit.“Well Qantas became one of only three airlines in the world that I can see that didn’t put an expiry date on them,” Mr Joyce said of the flight credits the airline offered.When she reminded Mr Joyce that they initially had an expiry date and the airline had to be pressured to lift the expiry, he said, “I think we got there and it was clunky at the start. I think we did a better job than most airlines in this space, being honest, Tracy, if you were with any other major airline in the world, you’re probably, your credits have expired and that was the reality on the credit story.”When Grimshaw commented that flight credits shouldn’t expire as our money doesn’t evaporate, Mr Joyce responded with, “I think it, today, even with the expiry, they’re now just a line on Qantas’s balance sheet.”However, the hardest legal battle Mr Joyce fought while Qantas chief was the call the airline made to sack baggage handlers and cleaners during the pandemic, instead outsourcing their jobs.The move was slammed as heartless, it was also illegal – Qantas was fined $90 million by the federal court.“It was horrendous making those calls, because it felt like cutting off your arm,” Mr Joyce said of the sackings.He said he would love to wind back time and “make a different decision”, and admitted that “they were sacked illegally”.Read related topics:Qantas