Qantas to cut Mumbai?

[Kieran Wells]

From The Australian:
QANTAS is considering axing its loss-making Sydney-Mumbai service after a disagreement with its pilots' union over meal allowances.

The airline will be forced to divert today's flight through Melbourne after the Australian and International Pilots Association refused to renew a concession that allows pilots to fly beyond hours outlined in their enterprise agreement.

The concession's end on Wednesday means Qantas must now change crews in Melbourne before continuing on to Mumbai instead of flying non-stop from Sydney.

However, an airline source said this would increase losses on the route and was likely to be the final straw for the service.

This could also mean new Airbus A330s slated for Qantas's mainline operations could now be sent to Jetstar and that would mean less flying for Qantas A330 pilots.

The A330 concession had been allowed to continue despite the overwhelming rejection in a pilot vote last year of a new enterprise agreement.

AIPA said pilot dissatisfaction had increased since then because meal allowances had not been updated for three years and were now significantly lower than those received by cabin crew.

Before Christmas, AIPA's executive committee decided it would not grant further concessions until the meal allowance issue was resolved.

But Qantas thinks the issue should be included in wider EBA talks.

AIPA vice-president Richard Woodward said Qantas did not help its case by waiting until the last minute before asking for an extension to the concession.

He said the airline had been told the extension for the A330s was coming up but had done nothing until the Airbus fleet manager wrote to the union on Tuesday.

"We couldn't do anything about it on such short notice and we had a committee meeting in December which decided we would give the company no more concessions against our contract until the allowances were brought up to parity with the cabin crew," he said.

Mr Woodward accused Qantas of using the allowance disagreement as a smokescreen for other reasons for pulling out of Mumbai.

Qantas began flying to Mumbai in 2004 and the service gained notoriety in 2006 when British actor Ralph Fiennes and flight attendant Lisa Robertson had sex in an A330 toilet.

It began operating the route using an A330-300 with a stopover in Darwin but moved to a non-stop service using a smaller A330-200 in an attempt to stem losses believed at that stage to be more than $20 million a year.