Will QAN survive?, page-464

But there's many fewer flights!

Figures just out from the Australian Government's BITRE show that in January 2021, QAN operated 9429 commercial passenger flights, down from 17636 in January 2020, a drop of 46.5 per cent.

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'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.

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.

The only solace for QAN holders was that Virgin Australia - and here we are 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.

REX doesn't yet operate on the 'golden triangle' of SYD - Melbourne - Brisbane but interestingly its flight numbers in January 2021 were 1969, down from 4504 in January 2020, a decrease of 56.3 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 nowwhere near the '60 per cent' which Mr Alan Joyce previously said would occur in relation to percentage of flights operated compared to pre-COVID-19.