The pain continues at Qantas as the airline continues to suffer with the ever-changing market conditions, as it lost $252 Million in the first half of the year trading.
Qantas Airbus A380 at London Heathrow Airport – Image, GhettoIFE.
And the pain will continue on all fronts as the airline planes to remove 5,000 jobs from the Qantas staffing roster as part of a $2 Billion cost reduction plan
In terms of operations, the airline plans to increase its narrow-body fleet utilisation, whilst using domestic A330s on peak shuttles and East/West Australia links. Meanwhile, as A330-200s are released by Jetstar and are cycled back into the Qantas mainline fleet, allowing for the withdrawal of six Boeing 747-400s (leaving 9 in the fleet). Boeing 767 aircraft will be retied during Q3 2015.
For those who love Qantas’s A380s, the fleet will be kept at 12 aircraft, with deliveries for the remaining 8 aircraft to be deferred. The currently fleet will go through a timetable change to allow the aircraft to work more. Meanwhile in the Jetstar camp, the final three of 14 Jetstar B787-8s on order will be deferred, with the A320 order book being “restructured”.
For Qantas Group, this is a drop of 50 aircraft being withdraw, deferred or sold on.
There are impact on routes too with the airline
- Withdrawing between Perth-Singapore,
- Swapping out the Boeing 747-400s operating Brisbane-Singapore and Sydney-Singapore to A330s
- Re-timing Melbourne to London, thus releasing an A380 for additional services
So the source of this pain? Qantas blames Virgin Australia, as well as other competitors for increasing capacity to Australia by 46%, and Virgin Australia’s owners for pumping it with cash and importantly – capacity that Qantas has had trouble dealing with.
Qantas are in the middle of some serious pain as it attempts to adjust to new realities – and I strongly suspect the pain is going to continue for a long time to come yet…
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Sad how management and competition is squeezing the life out of a great and safe legacy carrier. Middle East and Asian carriers are cutting into its long haul market to Europe/Asia. For the trans Pacific market United, Hawaiian and Air Canada are cutting into that segment. Even Air New Zealand is doing great and some Aussies don’t mind flying with them to L.A. Essentially Qantas has been surrounded and I just hope they can somehow recover. But they’ll need a new CEO to pull it off. That or the fix has been in to decimate Qantas and carve up the market. Emirates alone can supply all the seats the Aussie long haul market requires with their huge A380 fleet. It’s a cruel world out there.
I also figure part of their scheduling is to blame. To optimise MEL/SYD-LHR and LHR-SYD/MEL schedules, there are 2 A380s idling in LHR for 15-16 hours a day. Ditto for MEL/SYD-LAX and LAX-SYD/MEL flights, there are 2 A380s idling in LAX for similar periods too. The planes experience shorter turnaround times on home turf in Australia than in LHR/LAX.