No international flights for another year, says Qantas
Qantas has confirmed that it won’t fly internationally at all this year, in a major blow to all those hoping to reach Australia any time soon.
The national flag carrier this week shed 6,000 jobs and released a three-phase plan out of the crisis which will see all its long-haul A380 aircraft parked in the Californian desert for at least three years, and 100 planes in total grounded for at least 12 months. International travel is not expected to begin again until next July, said CEO Alan Joyce.
“The domestic flight market will get back to maybe 70 per cent of pre-Covid levels in the next year and the following year to 100 per cent,” he said at a briefing.
“We think international will take a long time – nothing this next financial year, and next July we may start to see some international services and that will only get us to 50 per cent the following year, and only two-thirds of the pre-Covid international schedule.”
Qantas’ ambitious Project Sunrise, which aimed to operate the world’s first non-stop flights between London and Sydney from the end of 2023, has been postponed but not cancelled, he said.
“Aviation is used to sudden shocks, and Qantas has dealt with several just in the last decade and come through even stronger,” he stated. “But we've never experienced anything like this before, no one has. Airline revenues have collapsed, entire fleets are grounded and the world's biggest carriers are taking extreme action just to survive.”
Qantas, which this year celebrates its centenary, is the world’s oldest continuously operating airline and usually serves 85 destinations with a fleet of 133. It was founded in 1920 just after the Spanish flu pandemic.
Joyce says that when international flying does eventually restart, it will be aboard the smaller Boeing 787 and 330s first. “We’re parking the A380s for at least three years because they don’t have any use we think during this period of time,” he said. “The aircraft are being put into the Mojave Desert because the environment protects them better there, and we have the intention at the right time to reactivate them and comb them back in, but that is a considerable amount of time away.”
When international travel does recommence, it would likely be in the form of “bubbles between Australia and other countries with low levels of infection, like New Zealand and parts of Asia,” he said, making no mention of the UK.
The same week, Iata, the International Air Travel Association, warned that global revenue for 2020 will be cut in half and it could take more than three years before air travel returns to its pre-pandemic levels.
Addressing Project Sunrise, which ran a series of test flights in November last year, Joyce offered some hope. “We've gotten Airbus to agree to continue the terms of the A350-1000s to allow us to do Project Sunrise,” he said, stressing that only after the final phase of his plan in 2023 will Qantas be able to afford to buy the ultra long haul models.
Australia has taken a very strict approach to containing the coronavirus. It closed its national borders on March 20, its state borders soon after, and since March 28 all residents returning to Australia have completed two-week quarantines in a hotel room, which they cannot step outside of.
