This year’s award for optimism has to go to Qantas boss Alan Joyce. His decision to hold firm with a target to open the airline’s international operations by October is a glass three-quarter full moment.

Targets around the resumption of routes have been difficult to make in an environment where the trajectory of the pandemic recovery gets interrupted by spot fires, and state governments have politicised their decision-making on border closures.

As thirsty as the flying public and Qantas investors are to know the details of the airline’s international timetable, the reality is the decision, in large part, is out of the management’s hands.

No doubt Joyce would have been watching in despair at Australia’s vaccination dispensing debacle and the federal government’s rollout timetable being binned. Qantas’s prediction of opening up the international airways in October was based on earlier government projections that the vaccine rollout would be complete by that time.

There is little point in Qantas regularly changing its own timetable for international travel until there is a clearer picture of when the government will give a green light to international borders opening.

It has already needed to curb its enthusiasm, having originally set a July date for international travel.

It is near impossible to think that the majority of Qantas’s international routes will be open for business by the end of October. The more likely progression will be the addition of international travel bubbles such as the Australia-New Zealand quarantine-free agreement, which begins next week.

Japan is also considered a likely candidate for this kind of arrangement.

But the situation is fluid, making planning difficult for any airline that needs to stand up thousands of staff that have been sitting idly on JobKeeper.