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.
EXPRESSING GRATITUDE: Without its Taiwanese partners which are ‘working around the clock,’ Nvidia could not meet AI demand, CEO Jensen Huang said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and US-based artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Nvidia Corp have partnered with each other on silicon photonics development, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said. Speaking with reporters after he met with TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) in Taipei on Friday, Huang said his company was working with the world’s largest contract chipmaker on silicon photonics, but admitted it was unlikely for the cooperation to yield results any time soon, and both sides would need several years to achieve concrete outcomes. To have a stake in the silicon photonics supply chain, TSMC and
‘DETERRENT’: US national security adviser-designate Mike Waltz said that he wants to speed up deliveries of weapons purchased by Taiwan to deter threats from China US president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, affirmed his commitment to peace in the Taiwan Strait during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Tuesday. Hegseth called China “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security” and said that he would aim to limit Beijing’s expansion in the Indo-Pacific region, Voice of America reported. He would also adhere to long-standing policies to prevent miscalculations, Hegseth added. The US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was the first for a nominee of Trump’s incoming Cabinet, and questions mostly focused on whether he was fit for the
IDENTITY: Compared with other platforms, TikTok’s algorithm pushes a ‘disproportionately high ratio’ of pro-China content, a study has found Young Taiwanese are increasingly consuming Chinese content on TikTok, which is changing their views on identity and making them less resistant toward China, researchers and politicians were cited as saying by foreign media. Asked to suggest the best survival strategy for a small country facing a powerful neighbor, students at National Chia-Yi Girls’ Senior High School said “Taiwan must do everything to avoid provoking China into attacking it,” the Financial Times wrote on Friday. Young Taiwanese between the ages of 20 and 24 in the past were the group who most strongly espoused a Taiwanese identity, but that is no longer
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake and several aftershocks battered southern Taiwan early this morning, causing houses and roads to collapse and leaving dozens injured and 50 people isolated in their village. A total of 26 people were reported injured and sent to hospitals due to the earthquake as of late this morning, according to the latest Ministry of Health and Welfare figures. In Sising Village (西興) of Chiayi County's Dapu Township (大埔), the location of the quake's epicenter, severe damage was seen and roads entering the village were blocked, isolating about 50 villagers. Another eight people who were originally trapped inside buildings in Tainan
RSS