Vanessa Hudson, who has 28 years of service with the airline, has been appointed CEO of Qantas. She is the first female CEO in Qantas’s history.
Hudson was Qantas CFO since 2019 and steered the airline’s finances through the COVID period. She will take the CEO’s baton from the present CEO, the often-controversial Alan Joyce, in November this year.
Joyce was due to retire in 2020, but stayed on until now to shepherd the airline through the pandemic. He has been CEO for 15 years. According to the Financial Times, when he was made CEO in 2008, he rapidly transformed the airline into one of the most profitable globally, but in doing so cut thousands of jobs, incurring the ire of unions.
