February 28, 2010 – 2:40 pm
The headlines ‘screamed’ that cheap international air fares are over last week following the half yearly profit announcements by Qantas and Virgin Blue. Wrong! Cheap airfares have been over according to the major airlines, here and abroad, at every financial results press conference for at least the past five years. Since it is unthinkable that [...]
February 26, 2010 – 2:09 pm
The Qantas group/Virgin Blue group duopoly was declared dead by Tiger Airways president and CEO, Tony Davis, in Singapore a short while ago. Holding a press conference following its third quarter results reported in the post immediately before this one, Davis said its Australian operations had become profitable in only 18 months. “The Australian duopoly [...]
February 26, 2010 – 12:21 pm
The punch lines from the Air NZ half yearly results and the Tiger Airways third quarter reports out this morning and overnight respectively are that the former doubled its net profit after tax to $NZ 56 million and the latter, with only $S 15.9 million cash at year’s end really needed the injection of funds [...]
February 25, 2010 – 12:34 pm
This is a novel situation. An electronic book reader, a Kindle, which can be tracked when in use, is lost somewhere, most likely in the Qantas Lost Luggage system, which itself appears to be lost. A much respected figure in education writes: Dear Angry Flyers Lounge, Back in January on a return flight from Melbourne [...]
February 25, 2010 – 9:57 am
Singapore Airlines controlled Tiger Airways is giving away seats for nothing except the compulsory taxes and charges across most of its network on every Tuesday and Wednesday between April 7 and May 31 from today. This is incredibly generous. Having lost more than $70 million on its Australian operations since November 23, 2007, and locked [...]
February 24, 2010 – 6:34 pm
Virgin Blue didn’t just return to profitability in the six months to December 31, but became the first jet airline with an Australia wide network to earn better profits , whether per jet, per seat, or in aggregate, than the much larger Qantas group of airlines. It made a net profit after tax of $62.5 [...]
February 24, 2010 – 3:43 pm
Some gravely serious allegations about the conduct of Air France flight AF447, which crashed in the middle of the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board last June 1, have been published in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Titled ‘Head Crash in the Cockpit’, or more colloquially, a stroke, Gehirnschag im Cockpit doesn’t seem to [...]
February 24, 2010 – 11:11 am
The Virgin Blue group of airlines has made slightly more money than the Qantas group in the six months to December 31 with an after tax profit of $62.5 million compared to the larger groups $58 million reported last week. The carrier has approximately one third the domestic capacity and one third of the domestic [...]
February 24, 2010 – 9:36 am
Some metrics are as important to air transport as heart beats are to humans. Especially the pulse of the world’s largest banking system in the US. So if we assume that the most important metric in banking is that for the commercial loans that provide liquidity to the world’s largest economy, this chart and its [...]
February 23, 2010 – 9:30 pm
Travel Consumer Daily, published by Clive Dorman, is back, and one of its first stories is a look at why your trip to Bali could take around two hours longer than you might have thought because of visa sales issues at Denpasar. Just what you need with kids in tow at the start of a [...]
