Foreign airlines won’t be able to ramp up operations to meet the mass reopening of international travel into Sydney when 80% vaccination is reached because they will need several months to recall laid off staff and retrieve planes that have been parked in deserts.
Barry Abrams, the executive director of the Board of Airline Representatives of Australia, told Guardian Australia that airlines continued to be left in the dark about what the new rules and passenger limits would be, leaving them stuck “in a holding pattern” unable to commence planning for resuming routes.
Passenger allowances were a key factor for airlines in determining the financial viability of their routes, and Abrams warned that carriers that had not flown to the country in more than a year had not yet begun allocating aircraft or staff to Australian routes, nor had they begun renegotiating contracts with ground handling crews and local supply businesses.
Abrams said airlines were currently flying planes with about 6,000 empty seats a day into Sydney airport and were only able to carry 110 passengers. He warned the logistical hurdles international airlines must plan for to introduce new services meant passenger intake won’t dramatically increase for several months.
“Without any clear plan here, there is simply no logical reason for an international airline to begin considering increasing its flights into Australia,” Abrams said.
Passenger caps were halved nationally in July and resulted in some commercial flights being given a zero passenger allocation and forced to rely on cargo to subsidise the operation cost.
At the end of August, the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, announced the state would further halve its international arrivals intake to about 750 people a week so health workers within the hotel quarantine system could be redeployed to the state’s under-pressure hospital system.
In the same announcement, Berejiklian vowed NSW would scale up its quarantine intake again…