In recent decades there has been an increased emphasis on the practice of human resource management in the workplace due to the growing trend that human capital is the most important resource of a organization can acquire and retain. This area of ​​management applies to every aspect of a business, with one of the main components of the economy that appears to have a strong dependence on this discipline evidently being the airline sector. One of the leading companies in this space is Quantas, an Australian-owned brand that seems to be facing difficulties in recent times due to the global business crisis. It appears that despite operating at a loss, they still consider their employees their main capital resource, as demonstrated by their website's career statement that “our people are the most important part of our business. Find out more about careers at Quantas, one of Australia's most popular companies to work for” (Quantas Careers, 2014). However, upon further inspection of not only Quantas, but also the airline industry as a whole, it appears that the desire to work in this industry is decreasing due to increasing workloads, health and safety. Another factor that is causing this effect is the HR downsizing strategy, which can have a detrimental result for employee morale. Although this can be changed through different forms of strategic human resource management, it still has an important effect on their human capital. Even though everything seems to be bad for the industry, there remains a certain aspect that still attracts the workforce and this is evidently Quantas' approach to diversity, which promotes a multicultural workforce. While further investigation is needed, we need to start thinking about… halfway through the article… discovering strategic human resource management and the importance it can have within a workplace, we had to first conduct extensive research on an iconic brand that uses such practices. This brand was evidently Quantas and allowed us to delve deeper into the strategies of the airline sector, together with its own. Initially, after inspecting their careers website, they emphasized that their human resources were the heart of their company. However, as the study progressed, it became clear that due to downsizing, poor strategies, and being a reactive brand, Quantas actually did not hold their workers in as high regard as they had previously claimed, and it was seen that only kept this mission statement true through their diversity programs. A true reflection of how an iconic brand can actually start a downward spiral due to poor strategic human resource management.