Termination of strikes only option: Joyce

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Termination of strikes only option: Joyce

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce holds a media conference to announce the grounding of all flights.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce holds a media conference to announce the grounding of all flights.Credit: Dallas Kilponen

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce says Fair Work Australia (FWA) would need to order a termination of industrial action from the airline's unions if they want to be certain about getting the fleet back in the air.

Emergency FWA hearings are being held at the request of the government after Qantas made the shock announcement on Saturday to immediately ground its domestic and international flights and lock out engineers, pilots and other employees, beginning on Monday night.

Mr Joyce says he is hoping the Fair Work panel will order a termination on Sunday.

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This follows months of industrial action by three unions.

However, if they simply order a suspension, it might not be enough to get the flying kangaroo up and running again.

"A termination stops the lockout, but we have to make a decision about putting the airline back in the air," Mr Joyce told Sky News on Sunday.

"A suspension may not necessarily mean the airline gets back in the air.

"If it's a suspension, we cannot put the planes back in the air without having certainty.

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"A termination gives us certainty, a suspension, depending on what the suspension looks like, does not necessarily give us certainty."

The Fair Work panel hearing will resume in Melbourne at 2pm (AEDT) on Sunday.

If a termination is ordered, Mr Joyce said the airline would need to go through a process with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which could take a few hours.

If that approval was given, he said it would take another six hours to get the fleet flying once more.

Mr Joyce denied that the strategy in grounding the airline was to push the federal government to intervene.

"The strategy for us was always to get a negotiated settlement with our unions," he said.

However, after talks over more than nine months, more than 200 meetings and a cost of $68 million, Mr Joyce said continued disruptions were making Qantas "bleed".

"The only course for us ... is to take our own industrial action to bring it to a head.

"So that both parties would sit down and have sensible negotiations."

When asked about the timing of the grounding - just a day after the airline held its annual general meeting in Sydney on Friday - Mr Joyce said he thought the event would be a "watershed" moment.

"We thought the unions were building up the AGM as a vote of confidence on the management and on the board and that once that might be decided, we may get a change in rhetoric, a change in tone.

"We went to the AGM, we had overwhelming support, 96 to 97 per cent for all of the resolutions."

However, instead of the unions accepting the vote of shareholders, the unions' rhetoric got worse, he said.

"It actually escalated," Mr Joyce said.

Management then met on Saturday in a push "to do something".

He admitted that the option of grounding had previously been on the cards, saying "we always are going to be planning a whole series of different contingencies".

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