Knocking Off Work To Lay Bricks
The Age
Friday July 18, 1997
Not many company chairmen leap to their feet in small cafe-cum-departure lounges of regional airports to serve elderly disabled customers cups of coffee.
Fewer still look on their retirement as a "great opportunity" to get out the tool-kit their staff gave them as a leaving present to help rebuild a World War II aircraft.
And hardly any, as their 70th birthdays loom, look forward to getting together more regularly with friends to fly old American fighters (in this case a 1949 Trojan T28, a survivor of the CIA's secret war in Laos) in ground attack formation sequence at airshows up and down the country.
But Don Kendell, 67, former farmer, commercial pilot and one of the founding fathers of Australia's regional airline sector, is not like the average retired CEO who has been "kicked upstairs" to the company chairmanship.
Based in Wagga Wagga, he retains the relish he has had for aircraft since he first saw one fly overhead at his father's property 60 kilometres from the NSW town 60 years ago.
But unlike many successful businessmen who built a company from scratch, Mr Kendell (who retired at the end of June) knew when it was time to hand over to younger, hungrier people in the company.
Not even a love of aircraft was enough to persuade him to try to stay in operational charge of the airline whose planes bear his name.
"I had reached my use-by date," he says bluntly. "Your memory starts to go, you slow down. You have just got to acknowledge the fact that young people can do the job better than you can.
"I have seen a lot of people stay too long - I guess Reg Ansett was one - they have to be carted off screaming. The world changes, the reality is that there are people now up with the most modern movements in computers and modern computerised aircraft, and I'm computer illiterate.
"And," he adds with a grin, "I still think there's a bit of life left after work."
Mr Kendell, who learnt to fly back in 1950 at the Wagga Wagga airfield that is now his company's base, never planned to start his own business.
Travelling to the UK in the mid-1950s, he worked as a pilot for British European Airways, initially flying DC3s out of Glasgow and then Viscounts from London.
Marriage and fatherhood followed and, in 1959, he and his wife, Eilish, and his oldest son, Guy (now a 737 captain with Ansett), returned to his father's farm near Wagga.
A profit on a property deal in Western Australia gave him the capital to start a charter operation in the mid-1960s.
"I did some work for a firm which was in financial trouble. I went in with them, and in effect they stood me up," he said. "I discovered the only way I was going to get any money out of them was if I bought them out. That was my first introduction to business."
Although regional airlines were permitted to go into business in 1968, Mr Kendell held back. It was in 1971, when Ansett discontinued its thrice-weekly Melbourne-Wagga return service, that he got a licence and began operating a five-days-a-week service that has now become 20 flights a week on this route.
It was not, of course, all smooth skies. In 1974, Mr Kendell sold the family car to help pay aviation fuel costs after they trebled in the wake of the first oil shock.
In the recession of 1981, he had to sell his house and plough the cash back into the business, moving into a rented property until the company recovered with the economy.
The airline he set up has been in profit since 1985, he says. That was when Ansett increased its holding to 30 per cent before moving to 100 per cent control in 1990, the year the two-airline policy ended and Australian skies were deregulated.
"Since 1990, the company has been able to concentrate more on its core business. We have been in a much better position financially and in every way," says Mr Kendell.
"The business is now six times more valuable . . . Turnover in the last financial year was $105 million - nine years ago it was $16 million.
"We didn't know what the future would be with deregulation. Ansett had been interested in the company during the boom years of the late 1980s, and I was 60 years old and didn't feel like ending up on the street, so we sold out to them," he says.
"But I have been able to run it since as an autonomous business, certainly on a day-to-day basis, in every aspect. It operates with its own treasury, accounting, maintenance operations, engineering, the whole bit."
Mr Kendell says the 1990 deregulation of the sector was the biggest change the industry has had to face, forcing increased fare flexibility, scheduling and competition.
"The proof here is that, seven years after deregulation of the interstate routes, air fares are 22 per cent cheaper in straight cash terms than they were in 1990, and they are still making a bit of money. And the number of people domestically who travel by air has doubled in the past seven years, even though part of that period was the worst recession in 60 years."
After a lifetime in the business, Mr Kendell can be sure that not just Kendell airlines but Aero Pelican and Skywest Airlines, two other Ansett subsidiaries of which he is chairman, will canvass his expertise from time to time.
And, if asked, he has plenty of tips for younger players, particularly on coping with downturns and recessions.
"We learnt to handle recessions, to the extent that in the 1991-92 recession we were one of the few airlines that were profitable right throughout. We learnt back in the 1970s that you don't acquire aircraft in the boom, you acquire them from other people who got them in the boom and then went broke."
© 1997 The Age