Virgin blue finish lst-bne
 

According to DJ march in-flight magazine. They will be ending LST-BNE flights at the end of this month. Does that mean that there is no more direct flights from LST to Queensland as Jetstar pulled their flights also a while back. I guess its a sign of the times. Are HBA flights to QLD still running on either airline?

DJ did say when they launched that service that it was a seasonal service, meaning when demand is there they will operate it.

Michael

Jetstar still fly BNE-LST 4x weekly and the flight is still in the schedules for November. Jetstar no longer fly BNE-HBA. But DJ maintain a daily nonstop BNE-HBA flight as well as many one stop connections via SYD/MEL to both LST/HBA

From memory, when JQ ceased its BNE-HBA flights, they said that the Launceston flights were doing quite well with reasonable loads. It's no wonder they didn't have good loads on the Hobart flights - the return flight to BNE didn't arrive until just before midnight, whereas the DJ flight left in the early afternoon.

With regards to Virgin Blue's BNE-LST service, this was only ever going to be a seasonal service and may be back next summer.

Loads can't have been that bad. HBA-BNE had the 2nd highest load factor of any route in the country for the year to date up until it was canned by JQ. The only reason that the LST-BNE stayed and the HBA-BNE was canned is that the LST-BNE receives government subsidies, where as the HBA-BNE does not.

The 170s have been moved to the new TSV flights in April. OOL/CBR/ROK/CNS

So that's where the aircraft comes from to start all these new flights out of TSV. I was wondering where they were switching the capacity from to do it. The new flights per-drw and mel-drw that 737 also would have came from somewhere else. I don't think Virgin are grounding any planes as such they just utilize them on new routes. Which in a business sense is very good. Also the mel-nan and adl-nan are 2 more. Its good that Virgin is doing a lot of expansion this year despite the recession. What new routes have Qantas or Jetstar announced lately in Australia? I can only think of Jetstar new nz dom services which just replace QF nz routes which is not really a capacity increase. They must have parked up a few planes already.

What a strange comment!

You start by saying that they are just simply re-arranging capacity rather than grounding them, and then say that they're doing a lot of expansion!

New routes - yes.
Expansion - no.

Why would JQ have canned this route if loads were so high? Also, do you know why the LST route is subsidised (and by how much) and HBA wasn't?

The main point I was getting at is. Virgin are starting all these new routes in a downturn where Qantas is not.

Small correction to my last post. BNE-HBA had the 3rd highest load factor for the year to date before it was canned.
Top 3 were PER-SYD (86.0%), ADL-OOL (83.4%) and BNE-HBA (82.8%).

In other news, seems to be two major changes to DJs Tasmania services with the cutbacks effective May 7 (going by DJ booking engine). SYD-LST appears to be canned, and whilst the SYD-HBA is staying double daily, DJ have followed JQ and canned the early morning SYD departure from HBA, so only one DJ aircraft will O/N in HBA from May 7. Very strange move in my opinion given that JQ had just handed DJ all the yield on a plate, and DJ have just tossed it away :confused:!

Bit sneaky of DJ to say in their press release that they are not withdrawing from any markets. Obviously by markets they mean destinations, not individual routes :mad:.

I believe it is just canned for winter as it is back again later in the year. (IE DEC)

These recent moves by both JQ and DJ make it impossible to get from HBA to SYD early morning. Why wouldn't have DJ have kept the 6.30am HBA-SYD flight, they would have picked up an awful lot of business travellers due to JQ re-timing their 6.10am flight to later in the morning.

Why wouldn't DJ have replaced the 737 service with an E-Jet?

I agree.

If only DJ had one more E-170 in the fleet, they could base it at HBA, and operate something like:

HBA-SYD 6:30-8:20
SYD-HBA 8:50-10:45
HBA-ADL 11:15-13:45
ADL-HBA 14:15-16:30
HBA-SYD 17:00-18:55
SYD-HBA 19:25-21:15

They could keep the 737 doing the 6:25am SYD-HBA-SYD service, but drop the afternoon 15:30 SYD-HBA-SYD 737 service. This way, HBA-SYD would get 3 services daily (6:30am, 8:50am, 17:00 pm), 2 of which are E-170s and 1 x 737. It also provides an aircraft to maintain the HBA-ADL (with a smaller aircraft) rather than dropping it.

Also, SYD-LST has in fact not been canned. Daily flights remain, but in a new timeslot, departing SYD at 9am.

According to the April issue of Australian Aviation. Virgin blue has deferred the delivery of 6 E-jets until 2010. So they wont have any spare E-jet capacity to start early morning HBA-SYD flights. I agree its a big market between 2 state capitals its a shame no early flights. It seems Tas has got the raw deal from both airlines.