Will QAN survive?, page-1668

We're certainly seeing an airline in QAN with an odd strategy.

Yesterday it had more domestic flights from SYD than today (latter is Monday 27 September 2021).

Today, it has just two 'red tail' departures from Sydney, to Brisbane and Melbourne. Subsidiary Jetstar has one departure to Adelaide and another to Hobart: its flight to Melbourne has been cancelled.

A 'normal' Monday two or three years ago would have seen at least 130 QAN Group planes departing SYD to domestic destinations, including a typical (including Jetstar) 40 plus to Melbourne alone and 20 plus to Brisbane.

Competitor Virgin Oz has seven Boeing 737-800 flights ex SYD today, while REX (which often or always doesn't fly on weekends, another oddity) has 11 small SAAB 340B turboprops to various NSW rural city/town destinations, although two flights to Dubbo (centre of a COVID-19 'case cluster' IIRC) and one to Narrandera were cancelled. REX's larger Boeing 737-800s remain mothballed at a substantial cost to this small company.

Of the reduced number of only nine passenger-carrying international flights from SYD today, none are by QAN Group aircraft.

From Melbourne today, QAN has three 'red tails' to SYD (note that this is unbalanced with only one southbound, so aircraft must require repositioning), one each to Alice Springs and Perth, while smaller Boeing B717s service Canberra and Launceston, and two turboprops head northwest to Mildura and one south to Tasmania's Devonport.

Offshoot Jetstar has six A320 flights, none of which are to SYD. So from Melbourne, that's a total of 16 flights from the QAN Group, compared to four from SYD.

From Melbourne, rival Virgin Australia has scheduled 12 B737-800 jets, and unlike the QAN airlines, Virgin continues to have a flight to the Gold, and separately Sunshine, Coasts in sunny Queensland. REX has eight small turborprop flights from Melbourne.

Due to abysmally low passenger caps inbound, there are only five international flights from Melbourne today, three of which are Singapore Airlines, one by its subsidiary Scott and one from Qatar Airways of the Middle East.

Quite a few QAN international aircraft are busy with freight or passenger repatriation flights, and these with various government subsidies are presumably all profitable but they can't obscure how much of the domestic fleet sits idle on Oz's east coast with the same applying to some international aircraft.