“We’ve worked with our government to get the right visa structures in place that enable us to bring our engineering levels back to complement. We are feeling good about the pipeline of cabin crew and pilots in Australia as well,” she said.

The airline’s head of international flights Cam Wallace said the decision to withdraw flights from mainland China less than a year after relaunching them was due to aircraft capacity restraints and Qantas’ failure to get approval to coordinate with China Eastern.

“We’re going to have to make decisions quicker and be more agile with deploying aircraft into more productive cities, especially as we move towards fleet reinvestment,” Wallace said.

“Getting out of China was the right call. We still serve China through Hong Kong, and we still have a code share relationship with China Eastern,” he added.

This reporter travelled to Dubai as a guest of IATA.