January 31, 2012 – 8:26 pm
Tiger has been given approval to lift its flight sectors from 32 to 38 a day, and has announced that two of them will be used for daily return daylights between Melbourne and Cairns from 25 April. Other routes where some of the unused approvals will be used are Melbourne-Sydney and Melbourne-Perth, with details yet [...]
January 31, 2012 – 6:35 pm
There is a more direct way to convey the message delivered by the restrained language of the Moody’s rating agency in downgrading Qantas to one notch above non-investment or junk status. It is to say that Qantas has lost its way. Despite having around 64% of the domestic market as a group including Jetstar, Qantas [...]
January 31, 2012 – 2:30 pm
Hong Kong Airlines is exclusively offering Qantas flights to Hong Kong for connection to its all premium cabin A330 services onwards to London not only for much less than the Qantas fare in business class all the way to London, but less than the same class on Qantas for flights to Hong Kong. While air [...]
January 31, 2012 – 12:39 pm
The Qantaslink surge in regional Australia continued to build on earlier announcements in Western Australia with news today that it will soon add more Boeing 717s and Bombardier Q400s to Queensland services. The fleet strategies of Qantaslink, and Virgin Australia, both involve fragmentation and the use in most instances of older jets flown by contractors [...]
January 31, 2012 – 10:36 am
It is disconcerting to hear radio reports this morning blaming Tiger Airways latest quarterly losses in its Australian operations on CASA reducing the frequency of its flights. It lost money in Australia not because of what CASA did, but because Tiger was so badly managed prior to its being grounded for five weeks in the [...]
January 31, 2012 – 9:46 am
Onlookers will be keen to know more, if there is more, as to the reasons for Rob Fyfe resigning as CEO of Air New Zealand, which owns one fifth of Virgin Australia. Like his predecessor Ralph Norris, who moved from the Kiwi flag carrier to become an also highly successful CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, [...]
January 30, 2012 – 9:37 pm
Almost no-one but the ABC fell for the Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, folding the latest grim news about the Joint Strike Fighter into the release of the latest unfortunately named Defence Force Posture Review progress report for public review today. Our defence posture is one of being obscenely violated by years of ascendancy by a [...]
January 30, 2012 – 11:27 am
Welcome to my nightmare. When Etihad announced an app to turn frequent flyer points or miles into cash at the point of sale with my tablet or phone it probably fulfilled the wildest dreams of some of the sharper minds in the ATO. How? By converting the non-taxable generation of loyalty rewards into cash payments, [...]
January 30, 2012 – 8:34 am
It doesn’t matter where we are when we smell unexpected smoke because fire can spread rapidly and cause heavy loss of life, and the time in which to prevent this happening is sometimes extremely short. We all know this. For that reason, the diversion of a Qantas 767 to Mt Isa yesterday when smoke was [...]
January 29, 2012 – 6:02 pm
If you were wondering how Virgin Australia will handle its new domestic business class product in an Embraer E-190 the seat map published on its web site has a surprise. As has the plan for the remaining 737-700s, which essentially keep the existing premium economy geometry but with what looks like slightly less seat pitch [...]
