Adaptability, liquidity key to Qantas resilience: Joyce

Qantas boss Alan Joyce says future pandemics, cyber attacks and global conflict still pose a threat to the airline industry as he prepares to depart the company after 15 years in the cockpit.

The 56-year-old Irishman said analysing and adapting to risks is key to running an airline, during a public discussion at the International Congress of Actuaries in Sydney on Wednesday, alongside brother Anthony Joyce who works as an actuary evaluating risk for Medibank.

"When you think of aviation, what do we do? We put up to 500 people in an aluminium tube, put two rockets on it and send them in the air," Mr Joyce said.

"If that's not risky...

"Yet it's the safest form of transport."

He said as a whole, the airline industry could not afford to be complacent in terms of passenger safety and global factors.

"I think you have to prepare for a whole range of things that could happen," he said.

"Could war happen potentially in the region? It's happened in Europe, we never thought we'd see another war in Europe."

Key to airlines remaining resilient is maintaining a strong balance sheet with liquidity to weather unexpected disruptions, according to Joyce, with Qantas posting record profits of $1 billion at the start of this year.

Mr Joyce said prior to COVID-19 the risk of pandemic was on the airline's radar - after taking a $200 million dollar hit during the SARS outbreak in Asia - but ultimately they were unprepared for the scale of what occurred.

"Believe it or not it was always on our risk register as significant, as possible, but not massive in terms of the potential implications," he said.

Following reports of the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in China, Mr Joyce said he was told by an analyst international and domestic borders could close within six months.

"I thought, 'that couldn't happen could it? They'd never close the domestic borders will they. We're not going to be North Korea and South Korea'," Mr Joyce joked.

"Yet the only thing he got wrong, it didn't happen in six months, it happened in six weeks."

Mr Joyce justified firing thousands of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, reiterating that at one stage Qantas had 11 weeks before it went bankrupt.

"You have to be ... willing enough to take the necessary actions, tough actions in some cases, so you can come out and protect as many jobs as possible on the other side," he said.