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Virgin Australia Fokker 100 breaks cover

written by australianaviation.com.au | April 10, 2013
VH-FSQ in Virgin colours. (Brenden Scott)

The first Skywest aircraft to be repainted in Virgin Australia colours has arrived in Perth after repainting with Flying Colours in Townsville.

The aircraft is pictured here on approach to land at Perth on April 10, a day before Virgin Australia’s takeover of Skywest officially takes effect.

Skywest operates Fokker 100s and Fokker 50s on a mix of fly-in/fly-out services for the mining sector and WA intrastate passenger services, as well as ATR 72s under contract to Virgin Australia.

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Comments (13)

  • Thomas Jaeger

    says:

    Will Skywest be fully integrated into Virgin Australia with all operations under the Virgin Australia name or will scheduled flights in Western Australia continue to operate as Skywest? I assume they will definitely continue with a separate AOC regardless?

  • Ron

    says:

    Virgin by name, Skywest by AOC, as far as I understand it.

  • Merpati

    says:

    “Virgin by name, Skywest by AOC, as far as I understand it.”

    So it’s a Skywest operated flight but pretending to be Virgin? Isn’t there some law against ‘false advertising’? Passengers will truly believe it’s a Virgin flight they’re flying. The same goes for Jetconnect and Qantas.

  • Pat

    says:

    Ron is correct.

  • Sam

    says:

    One of my favourite aircraft is the F100. It’s ashame Fokker is no longer around

  • Sam2

    says:

    Operations by partner airlines are a widespread practice – itineraries and booking engines usually will provide details of which airlines provide flights.

  • Sam

    says:

    Marpari. You are a little bit behind this trend. Qantaslink aircraft in Perth are actually Cobham. Qantas uniforms but Cobham crew. The service onboard is all the same it’s just a different subsidiary

  • Ryan

    says:

    I still think Virgin Australia should of kept Skywest colours or change it to a new name like VirginWest

  • aaron

    says:

    I think its completely Virgin but I would assume it would take some time before merging/aligning the different IT systems like booking engine

  • wally

    says:

    I don’t think those that board these A/C will care less about who’s running/owns the show.
    These days it’s hard to know who owns who in any industry.
    It’s a service, no more no less

  • John N

    says:

    I agree Wally.

    If I look at the last three times I’ve flown, Jetstar Sydney to Hobart, it was both a Jetstar and Qantas code share flight.

    A bit before that I flew Sydney to Melbourne with Virgin and it was both a Virgin and Etihad coded flight.

    And last year I flew to Prague and booked the flight with Czech Airlines, I flew Sydney to Abu Dhabi on Etihad and then Czech Airlines from Abu Dhabi to Prague, that was another code share flight too, it was the reverse coming back.

    As an interesting side note on the European trip, when I checked out the available flights on the Flight Centre website, both the Czech Airlines flight and the Etihad flight, even though they were listed separately under different flight code numbers were in fact the same flight, the only difference was that by booking with Czech Airlines my partner and I saved nearly $500 return each!

    Bottom line for me is if I get the flight I want, for the right price and a decent airline too, I don’t mind what logo the aircraft wears!

    Cheers,

    John

  • Andrew

    says:

    HOPEFULLY, Virgin will retire the Fokker 50 fleet. I was flying them with Air UK as the F27 30 years ago, and had the recent misfortune to fly as PAX to Albany. Disliked ’em then, Hate ’em now!! CRJ would be a great replacement for this route. F100 too exxy.

  • Peter

    says:

    As a regular user of SKW hopefully it means the end of the unreliable Fokker 50.

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