HTI may be booming, but figures just out from the Australian...

HTI may be booming, but figures just out from the Australian Government's BITRE show that in January 2021, REX (which doesn't yet operate on the 'golden triangle' of SYD - Melbourne - Brisbane) had flight numbers in January 2021 of 1969, down from 4504 in January 2020, a decrease of 56.3 per cent.

On quite a few routes, principally in NSW, REX only seems to operate on weekdays now.

School holidays are usually extremely busy for our domestic airlines, trains and road-based facilities like roadhouses but at least for airlines, not so in January 2021.

QAN operated 9429 commercial passenger flights, down from 17636 in January 2020, a drop of 46.5 per cent.

QAN's drop in seat capacity would be even greater because almost all of its Airbus A330-200s have been mothballed, whereas previously quite a few more flights (especially from the east coast of SYD and Melbourne to Perth) had these larger aircraft, not just the cramped Boeing 737-800s. Even on the SYD - Melbourne route, while AFAIK most flights by January 2020 had become 737-800s, there were a small number that would be the larger Airbuses but today often there's only one return flight on this route that has this greater number of seats - that aircraft travels from SYD, then to Melbourne, Perth and in reverse back to Sydney.QAN

Subsidiary Jetstar had just 3830 flights, not much more than a median of 50 return trips a day, compared with 7442 in January 2020, a decline of 48.5 per cent. This means lots of idle aircraft, and doesn't even consider its (or QAN's) unused normally international aircraft.

Virgin Australia - comparing iterations 1.0 and 2.0, pre and post-Bain - had 4670 flights, compared with 12003 in January 2020, so its flight numbers declined 61.1 per cent.

This meant overall in Australia, the total number of commercial passenger flights between the two Januarys decreased 54.7 per cent from 43986 to 19898.

Although he's since revised the percentage IIRC, the number operated is nowhere near the '60 per cent' which Mr Alan Joyce of QAN previously said would occur in relation to percentage of flights operated compared to pre-COVID-19.

These disastrous figures must call into question whether REX will delay its planned entry onto the SYD - Melbourne route, as one doubts there's been much improvement in February, especially with Daniel Andrews having imposed a disastrous five day lockdown in Melbourne until this Wednesday. Some estimates put the cost of this to Victoria (and Australia) at $500 million to $1 billion.

Ben Groundwater in 'The Age'/'SMH' Traveller (to be in those papers on Saturday 20 February says interstate travel won't resume until a few preconditions are met.

He's wrong in suggesting the Australian Government ought take over quarantine for international arrivals - the States wanted to do this and agreed to in March 2020, allegedly 'enthusiastically, so Andrews/McGowan/Palusczuk ought step up to the plate rather than Berejiklian in NSW having to continue to shoulder most of the burden - but on other points, Mr Groundwater's largely correct. Read it.