ONE week from grounding his fleet, sparking the biggest industrial fight in decades, Qantas boss Alan Joyce tells how cancer, patriotism and a love of numbers steeled his resolve.
IT WAS not the smell of avgas or the glamour of flying that lured a young Alan Joyce into aviation. It was pure nerdiness.
Joyce - son of a Dublin cleaner and factory worker - had never been on a plane until his first job as an Aer Lingus operations research analyst when he was 22.
Joyce only applied for the job because it sounded deliciously geeky - full of the numbers and probabilities he adored as a mathematics and physics student at Trinity College, Dublin.
Aviation, Joyce discovered with delight, is actually just a very fancy kind of maths - a series of continuously morphing number-problems involving passengers, schedules, rosters, risks, fatigue, loyalty.
Now Alan Joyce has to solve his biggest mathematical problem yet: how to turn Qantas around after staging the biggest act of industrial brinkmanship in decades.
Last weekend he put an end to the nine-month industrial dispute that had been costing the airline millions of dollars, as well as its reputation.
Joyce decided to lock out the striking workers and ground the worldwide fleet, disrupting flights for 100,000 passengers and sparking equal measures of outrage and admiration for his sheer audacity.
The cost of his decision already has mounted to $50 million - $20 million of which will go towards free flights for angry customers. But Qantas' image may never recover.
How will Joyce solve that one? Part of the answer was the 45-year-old Irish-Australian's stubborn resolve.
The same steel that helped him survive a highly aggressive form of prostate cancer earlier this year has helped him endure yet another tumultuous battle.
Within two days of his prostate being removed, Joyce was out of hospital and running the airline from his sofa at home.
"I was extremely lucky," he said.
"I was planning to do the test when I was 50 and the doctors told me there is an 80 per cent chance I'd be dead if I'd waited that long.
"It certainly makes you appreciate things more ... your family, your friends. I appreciate this great job I have, this great organisation I work for."
Sitting in his Sydney office on Friday evening, Joyce looked exhausted but was still optimistic about the bumpy road ahead.
"You step back and think about what's actually happening. (My experience) has given me more drive, more passion to do what I need to do.
"It was a real moment where I got refocused ... it gave me that extra spirit of energy."
Alan Joyce is a proud leftie and lifelong Labor voter. Or he was up until this week.
After being excoriated by Labor politicians at all levels, and even compared with Richard Nixon by one, Joyce said he might be reconsidering his loyalties.
"I've always been progressive in terms of my politics," he said.
"I'm very passionate about reconciliation, social awareness.
"I've been very liberal with a small 'l' on everything and in terms of how I've voted it would have always been on the left of politics."
But he won't say if he voted for Julia Gillard.
Last Sunday morning Joyce was cheery and full of adrenalin, despite airports and hotels worldwide being packed with furious, stranded passengers.
At Pyrmont, an inner suburb of Sydney, the stylists at Network Ten's basement make-up room were chatting among themselves about the Qantas drama, musing about what would happen to Christmas flights and how tough "that Irish guy" must be when in walked the man himself, smiling.
One of the stylists swept a black plastic hairdressing smock over Joyce's shoulders and powdered his face, while Joyce chatted about the most dramatic 24 hours of his life. His main feeling? "Relief," he said.
That was the first day of Alan Joyce's new life, suddenly as a household name.
"Making the decision on the Saturday was a relief," he said.
"But for me there was big concern for our customers. We didn't know how many we'd disrupt or how long it was going to last. But I knew if I didn't do anything we'd have this disruption going for a year."
Joyce also was worried about how angry travellers would react to the airline's front-line staff.
"A lot of the people on the customer-facing end of our business have been coping with this for a long time, so there was concern about how they'd handle it," he said.
"But at the same time, I knew this was bringing it to the end. I knew once we got through this, it was going to be better for everybody."
He didn't sleep until about 2.30am Monday when he got the call from his team in Melbourne to tell him the dispute had been terminated by industrial tribunal Fair Work Australia.
"There was huge relief," he said. "But the time it really hit me was when I walked into the emergency centre we set up. There were 50 of them (crew members) there when I walked in on Monday afternoon and they gave me a standing ovation.
"There were people crying because it's all over - all this uncertainty for the past nine months is gone."
Joyce would like to clear one thing up. He's not anti-union. In fact, as the son of proud workers, he joined the Clerical Services Union as a young Aer Lingus staffer, about the same time he took that first flight.
"I was 22 and I flew from Dublin to Chicago. I was lucky. My first flight was business class, because I was working for the airline.
"I do think unions have a role to play. There are a lot of good unions out there that do the right things and do make a difference. I'm not, and I'm never going to be, anti-union. I'm pro-Qantas. That takes a bigger right over anything I feel about unions."
Revenue management was Joyce's first specialty at Aer Lingus. He had to design a mathematical model to determine how many seats the airline should sell on each flight, assuming a small percentage of passengers wouldn't show up. Joyce loved that each airline seat was utterly perishable - if there was no bum on the seat it would be lost forever.
His job was to make sure that didn't happen by working out exactly how many seats the airline should overbook to compensate for potential "lost" seats.
"It was a risky game," he said. "What about the passengers' fury if the calculations were wrong and they showed up at the gate to find their seats already sold?"
After revenue came scheduling and Joyce still collects antique airline schedules as souvenirs.
"It's a bit of a nerdy thing, I know, but John Travolta (Qantas ambassador) does it too, so I didn't feel as nerdy when I found out he collects them."
Travolta likes 1930s timetables for their evocation of ragtime glamour. Joyce just likes the numbers.
After eight years at Aer Lingus, Joyce was hooked. He came to Australia to work for the doomed Ansett in 1996 and moved on to Qantas in 2000.
He became Jetstar's founding chief executive in 2003, then returned to Qantas as boss in 2008.
He now earns $5 million a year and lives in Sydney's prestigious The Rocks precinct with his partner of 12 years - a New Zealand man who Joyce doesn't want to talk about in the media.
His partner is deeply private and neither of them wants to talk about personal matters in the present air of hostility. Family is central to Joyce.
His parents still live in the family home in Dublin and he has been teaching them to Skype on a computer he bought for them.
Two of Joyce's three brothers are about to move to Australia with their wives and children.
"I'm about to become the favourite babysitter." he said.
Despite his huge salary, Joyce said he was fundamentally frugal.
"He's still a working-class boy," said one of Joyce's staunchest supporters, former defence force chief and Qantas board member General Peter Cosgrove.
"People become fixated on his appointment and his ($5 million) remuneration and probably think he's some kind of silvertail," he said.
"Alan Joyce came from a working-class background and dragged himself up through a career. He's a very clever, very compassionate and very talented man who is doing a great job as the CEO."
Cosgrove has loved watching Joyce outflank the enemy recently, shepherding passengers into hotel rooms or on to alternative airlines.
"It was more impressive than anything I've seen in the military," Cosgrove said.
"Given that we hadn't made a decision until the Saturday, anything that happened after that was going to be pretty impressive."
Once, Joyce applied to get into the Aer Lingus pilot stream. He failed the eyesight test, but jokes that the real problem was his personality.
"I'm too hyper. That's one of the points pilots bitch about in their corner of the blogosphere," he said.
Does the abuse hurt Joyce?
"No, because at the end of the day I'm doing the right thing and I have absolutely fundamental belief in what we're doing." he said.
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