Australia's new regional airline took to the skies yesterday, but one industry expert warned it faced a bumpy ride given the high costs involved.
Regional Express, to be known as REX, is owned and operated by Australiawide Airlines. The consortium is a merger of regional carriers Kendall and Hazelton Airlines.
Kendall and Hazelton were subsidiaries of Ansett Airlines, once Australia's largest domestic carrier, which collapsed earlier this year with unsustainable debts. While Ansett stopped flying, Kendall and Hazelton stayed in the air.
PHOTO: AFP
REX will have a fleet of 29 SAAB 340 and Metro 23 turboprop aircraft. It will initially fly 1,300 times a week between 35 regional and metropolitan destinations in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania states.
But as the new carrier embarked on its inaugural flight yesterday from Wagga Wagga in southwest New South Wales to Sydney, Aircraft Owners and Pilots' Association technical director Bill Hamilton said the airline would be lucky to still be operating within six months.
"Airport charges, fuel charges, the cost of maintaining aircraft, the cost of paying for all the services you have to have for an aircraft ... are really quite high," Hamilton told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio. At the end of the day, this is what will beat them," he said.
But Australiawide Airlines CEO Michael Jones said he was confident of the airline's future. He said that since creating the new airline last Thursday, bookings have increased about 25 percent over the preceding week's figures for Kendall and Hazelton. He dismissed Hamilton's comment as ``both uninformed and irrelevant on the basis that he hasn't seen our business plan.''
Jones said REX was different to other carrier that have tried and failed to break into Australia's regional routes because it was a merger of two established airlines.
"So we don't have to establish the infrastructure, we don't have to train the people and we don't have to establish the markets," he said.
Ansett Airlines and Qantas Airways dominated the sector for decades, but Ansett collapsed this year after a cutthroat price war with Qantas and Virgin Blue.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the