Upsizing

Operating costs on a per seat basis for small regional airliners are much higher than for larger aircraft. To an extent this can be offset by the now relatively low acquisition costs of say a secondhand Metro, but even so it’s hard to make the economics work, hence today only a few airlines such as Canberra’s Brindabella Airlines and western Victoria’s Sharp Airlines now operate a handful 19-seaters for RPT. But at the other end of the sector, Rex has thrived to grow to operate a fleet of 50 secondhand but still relatively young 34-seat Saab 340s, while QantasLink’s turboprop operation has just five 36-seat Dash 8-200/Q200s in service alongside 16 larger 50-seat Q300s and 21 74-seat Q400s.

The issues that that points to have been well identified but they are no closer to being solved, if indeed there are viable solutions. With only niche exceptions, the smallest regional airliner in production today is the 45-seat ATR 42. So, over time, regional airlines, with the exceptions of QantasLink and Skywest with its Fokker 50s, will have to upscale to larger aircraft to replace their existing fleets once those aircraft reach the end of their economic lives.

In the case of Rex, that might be as far as a decade away, but shifting up in scale is inevitable, and so then is it inevitable too that more regional centres lose their vital airlinks – without government intervention or subsidy.

Many larger regional and coastal centres are growing, so in time they will be increasingly able to support larger aircraft, perhaps at the expense of some frequencies. Plus, as we explore from p46 and in Debrief this issue, in the future those centres may well even see the larger turboprops now being studied by ATR and Bombardier providing their airlinks. But for smaller and more remote centres that – Queensland’s Qconnect subsidy system and Western Australia’s regulation of turboprop services aside – are only marginally profitable for the regional airlines that serve them today, it is inevitable that some will lose services.

Unless current government policy settings are changed, that is only a question of when, not if.

Welcome Williams

For the last 18 months or so Australian Aviation has been pleased to support the efforts of the Williams Foundation in promoting airpower issues by publishing Williams Foundation articles in the magazine.

We’re proud now to be able to extend that relationship further, with the launch this issue of the Williams Foundation’s own regular one page column in the magazine, ‘On Target’.

The first On Target column appears on p78 of this issue, and we welcome the column as a vehicle for the Williams Foundation to contribute its considered views to the airpower debate in Australia.