Regional king

But, in an odd quirk of history, no carrier in this region ever ordered the Fokker 100, or its smaller counterpart, the Fokker 70. “None were ever sold to an Australian airline,” Peter van Oostrum, director of aircraft remarketing at Fokker Services in the Netherlands, tells Australian Aviation, despite Ansett being a launch customer of the smaller turboprop Fokker 50. “All of the Fokker 100s, or 70s for that matter, were purchased as pre-owned airplanes by all of the Australian operators,” van Oostrum explains.

Between the first delivery to the then Swissair in 1988 and the end of production (and indeed Fokker as an aircraft manufacturer) in 1994, the airframer manufactured 278 Fokker 100 aircraft. A full third of these aircraft belong to Australian operators, taking wing across regional and rural Australia in particular, thanks to the particular demands of flight operations in the charter and smaller markets.

“There is some irony that a European designed and built aircraft is perfectly suited to remote operations in Australia,” Lee Schofield, chief executive officer of Alliance Airlines, explains. “The design of the aircraft is certainly a great advantage, particularly the rear mounted engines. I think the key aspect is the reliability, though. When operating to regional and remote areas we are significantly advantaged by the 99.5% dispatch reliability.”

The design of the aircraft is certainly a great advantage, particularly the rear-mounted engines.

Of the nearly one hundred and fifty Fokker 100 aircraft still in operation according to Fokker Services — the post-shutdown inheritor of the original equipment manufacturer responsibilities for all Fokker aircraft — a full third are in operation in Australia. The split is roughly equal between QantasLink, where Network Aviation operates 17 Fokker 100s; Alliance, with 16 of the larger jet plus eight of the smaller Fokker 70; and Virgin Australia Regional Airlines, which has 14.

“Qantas purchased Network Aviation in 2011, which at the time had a fleet of two 100-seat Fokker 100 aircraft and six 30-seat Embraer Brasilia EMB-120ER aircraft operating charter-only services,” the airline tells Australian Aviation. “Since then, Qantas and Network Aviation have grown the fleet to 17 Fokker 100 aircraft, operating regional passenger services along with charter flights.”

As European airlines phase out the Fokker 100, with regional operators for KLM, Austrian Airlines and Swiss the principal remaining carriers in that region using the aircraft, its Australian operations become increasingly prominent.

“The Fokker aircraft is ideally suited to support our charter business and regional RPT flying due to its size and capability,” Merren McArthur, chief executive of Virgin Australia Regional Airlines and Virgin Australia Cargo, says. “It is known as the workhorse of the Australian charter market for a very good reason. We are pleased to have developed a tailored reliability program so that the aircraft will continue to support our business for many years to come.”

The Fokker 100’s design makes it particularly suitable for Australian charter, rural and regional operations

The rear-engined Fokker 100 measures 35.53m from nose to tail, with a wingspan of 28.08m, and stretches 8.51m to the tip of its vertical stabiliser. Powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Tay 650 engines offering 15,100lb of thrust, the Fokker 100 has a relatively light basic maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) of 44,450kg, with a high gross weight version (MSN numbers 11444 and upwards) capable of 45,810kg.

That light MTOW means that navigation and landing fees, calculated on aircraft weight, are comparatively low.

With the exception of one Alliance-operated aircraft with a 48-seat all-business configuration, the Fokker 100s in Australia operate in an all-economy layout with, as the name pleasingly suggests, one hundred seats on board.

The passenger experience on these aircraft is, perhaps surprisingly, well above standard, with most seats pitched at 34 inches, a full three inches more than most domestic economy seats within Australia. The Fokker’s 3.3m-wide fuselage also enables generous seat width, with Fokker’s Peter van Oostrum claiming an extra four tenths of an inch in seat width over the Boeing 737’s 17” seats. Fokker’s standard layout at 32” gives 109 seats, but the extra nine passengers would necessitate an extra flight attendant.

As with many rear-engined fuselage-mounted twinjets, the wings help to reduce external noise and the incidence of foreign object damage: crucial for its Australian rural and charter operations to airstrips that are not always as improved as operators would wish.

“The benefit is clearly in the engines being high on the aft fuselage and with the protection from the wing,” Fokker’s Peter van Oostrum explains. “The risk of getting debris, in terms of small stones, sand, little twigs, minute pieces of rubber, stuff like that, on a runway — and the risk of having it ingested in the engines — is really very small.”

The Fokker 100 owes this characteristic to its derivation from the previous generation Fokker F28,” van Oostrum says. “The position of the engines is similar to that of the Fokker F28 and it was an original design requirement for the F28 to shield the engines as much as possible, because that airplane was designed to operate on unpaved strips. It was designed from the outset to do so. I guess we were lucky in having that original basic design. The Fokker 100 is a more modern type, and it’s not designed to operate on unpaved strips. It does need hard, paved runways. But we all realise that in the outback, sand may have been blown on the runway. The chances of getting that ingested into the engine are marginal.”

“It’s not just the actual position of the engine,” van Oostrum notes, “it’s also the design of the engine. The Rolls-Royce Tay 650 engine, which powers the Fokker 100, is configured with a wide chord fan. If you look at the fan when it’s at a standstill, you notice that the chord, the blades, are fairly wide. This means that any sort of sand or particles in general will be centrifuged out because the blade is wide: they travel along to the outside of the blade and, when they then leave the trailing end of the blade, they end up in the bypass duct, so they will not go through the core engine. So the chances of particles hitting the core engine are almost zilch.”

“Our experience has been very favourable, for the original F28 and certainly for the Fokker 100 as well,” van Oostrum says. “That definitely has been a benefit to operators in the outback or of any other desert strips in the world.”

The Fokker 100 combines airliner-style performance — a cruise altitude of 35,000 feet and a maximum speed of 462kt — with low approach speeds thanks to its moderate 17° wing sweep, and its 35kt maximum demonstrated crosswind component offers flexible operations even in challenging conditions. Altogether, it is very popular among Australian airlines, even for those with multiple options for capacity.

“The decision making around aircraft type is generally driven by the customer requirements, specifically the number of workers required to be transported to and from the minesite, as well as the distance to be travelled,” Virgin Australia’s Merren McArthur explains. “Turboprop aircraft are smaller than the Fokker 100 and so are better suited to support smaller workforces travelling shorter distances: less than 2 hours. Virgin Australia Regional Airlines did operate a fleet of 8 Fokker F50 turboprop aircraft until just over a year ago to service this segment of the market. However, the resources downturn saw a decline in demand for the F50, with many of these minesites closing down or moving to road transport, which is why we decommissioned this fleet in early 2016.”

When airlines — or their customers — are deciding on whether the Fokker 100 fits their needs, Alliance Airlines CEO Lee Schofield says, “aside from the obvious impact of passenger numbers and airport limitations, the main considerations are sector time and overall passenger comfort. Once you are looking at flights over an hour on a turboprop then the Fokker jet really starts to come into its own. Alliance also has the advantage of being the only Fokker 70 operator in Australia and the slightly smaller size of the aircraft allows it to be competitive on what might normally be regarded as a turboprop route.”

The Fokker 100’s role within Australia is diversifying from resources to RPT

At QantasLink operator Network Aviation, the Fokker 100s primarily operate on intra-Western Australia routes, from Perth to Karratha, Kalgoorlie, Paraburdoo, Geraldton, Broome, Port Hedland, Newman and Learmonth.

“The F100s are the right size aircraft to meet customer demand on these routes,” the airline tells Australian Aviation. “In response to the lower demand across most resources-related markets in recent years, we’ve been focused on adjusting the aircraft we operate to the Pilbara and regional WA so that we can keep supporting our customers with the frequency of flights they need, and the Fokker 100 has played a key part in that strategy.”

“The resources sector has certainly driven the increase in the number of Fokker aircraft operating in Australia and Papua New Guinea,” Alliance Airlines chief executive Lee Schofield explains. “While the aircraft have been operating in this way since 2002, and this has been unchanged, I think the real shift has been towards the aircraft also being operated on scheduled services by Alliance and other airlines.”

“All of our aircraft predominantly operate on regional routes,” Schofield — whose airline’s predecessor Flight West was Australia’s first Fokker 100 operator — says. “Some of the routes are closed charter operations, mainly for the resources sectors. An interesting example would be flights from each of Perth and Brisbane into the Granites mine – which could well be the worlds’ most remote mine site. We also have some inbound tourism focused flights that connect Melbourne, Uluru, Cairns and Sydney, and in New Zealand we have an aircraft based in Auckland for the same tourism company. Finally, a large amount of our flying is also on behalf of other operators as a wetlease. While most of these flights are also to regional centres, every now and then our aircraft can turn up operating between capital cities.”

At Virgin Australia Regional Airlines, the former Skywest, “the Fokker 100s are primarily used to fly closed charter services to support the fly-in fly-out requirements of the resources industry in Western Australia under long term contracts of three to five years,” chief executive Merren McArthur says, noting that the aircraft’s design, balanced between regional jet and small airliner, is ideal for its operations. “The Fokker 100 is ideal for the resources market, as it is capable of uplifting 100 passengers in high temperatures and on the shorter runways which are common at the various mine sites. The low capital cost of the F100 aircraft enables VARA to offer cost effective trip pricing to the mining customers, despite the relatively low utilisation of the fleet.”

Charter and FIFO (fly in, fly out) work “is relatively low utilisation compared to revenue passenger transport flying, as most of the demand is on Tuesdays through to Thursdays to align with the shift structure of the FIFO workforce,” McArthur explains. For context, “in the charter market, new business is won by signing new long term contracts with mining customers for specified resource projects, rather than by launching new routes.”

“Virgin Australia bought Perth-based regional airline Skywest in 2013, and renamed it Virgin Australia Regional Airlines”, or VARA, McArthur explains. “At that time VARA operated 12 Fokker 100s, 8 F50s and one Airbus A320 aircraft. Since the acquisition, VARA has grown the F100 fleet to 14 aircraft. Since acquiring VARA, we have signed five charter contracts with new resource customers and we have extended contracts with existing customers. Our client base includes some of the largest resource companies in the world.”

“Outside of the FIFO peaks,” McArthur says, “VARA also operates RPT flights throughout Western Australia, including destinations such as Broome, Kununurra, Port Hedland, Newman, Karratha, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie. We have also recently commenced operating RPT services to Darwin, Alice Springs and Adelaide.”

“With the resources downturn in recent years there has been considerable focus by mining and oil and gas companies to reduce their operating costs,” McArthur highlights. “In this climate, the low capital cost of the Fokker 100 aircraft makes it even more appealing. Operational performance and reliability is also critical to customer retention in this market, as a delay or cancellation can cost our customers millions of dollars in lost productivity.”

Virgin Australia’s partnership with Alliance to offer charter contracts, McArthur says, is already reaping benefits. “The strategic charter partnership between VARA and Alliance was authorised by the ACCC in May this year, and it is progressing very well. That partnership enables Alliance and VARA to jointly bid for new charter contracts. We are now able to offer customers an improved charter product, leveraging the national charter footprint of Alliance and the RPT network of the Virgin Australia Group. The partnership also allows the airlines to provide and procure services for each other on a preferential basis, including aircraft procurement, spare parts pooling and maintenance. This enables us to deliver a more reliable and cost effective service to our clients.”

In this climate, the low capital cost of the Fokker 100 aircraft makes it even more appealing. Merren McArthur

Maintenance remains a focus as the Fokker 100 enters its third decade

Fokker Services’ Peter van Oostrum tells Australian Aviation that a significant part of his company’s work is ensuring the safe, efficient and well-maintained operation of the Fokker 100 and other aircraft manufactured by the company’s predecessor.

“Partly because we are the type certificate holder of all of the Fokker types, we have an active engineering department looking at airworthiness issues in general. We also very much look at how we would be able to improve the actual airplane, or our services to operators. One aspect is to look at certain product developments, but one other aspect is the development of the maintenance program. We looked at increasing the maintenance tasks, so we’ve escalated numerous tasks over the past few years. That has been to the benefit of operators,” van Oostrum says.

“We have what we like to refer to as a zero-tolerance policy towards the unavailability of parts,” van Oostrum explains. “Even today, I ran across something which, in the future, may be a difficult part to get, so we have a team of experts looking at what parts may become unavailable because the vendor could stop manufacturing them, or maybe the vendor has already stopped. There may be still an abundant supply now but maybe not five years down the road. So we look at all those parts and decide how we will ensure that those parts will remain available given the likely demand that we foresee, or that we forecast for the future. This may mean that certain parts we decide to manufacture in house, because we have an EASA manufacturing approval. It may be that we decide that we have a number of vendors bid to make that part. We may do last-buys: if we’re certain about it, we’ll just buy 50,000 O-rings of a certain size and we’re dead sure that those will last for the next fifteen or twenty years or whatever.”

“So we have a very active policy in that respect,” van Oostrum concludes. “Now, it doesn’t mean that every single piece or part is available one hundred percent of the time, but we pretty much ensure that parts are available within reasonable time frames. That includes insurance parts, as well.”

Operators, meanwhile, are both investing in their own maintenance efforts while using global centres of expertise for heavy maintenance. QantasLink’s aircraft undergo line maintenance in Perth, the airline confirmed to Australian Aviation.

“VARA has made a significant investment in developing a tailored preventative maintenance program for our Fokker fleet to ensure that we are able to deliver the highest standard of operational performance and reliability to our customers,” CEO Merren McArthur says, noting that Virgin’s regional arm ranked second across all domestic airlines for on-time performance in the financial year to 2017.

“All line maintenance is carried out by VARA’s maintenance division based in Perth,” McArthur explains, noting that, however, “heavy maintenance is carried out by Fokker Air Services in Singapore and Austrian Technik Bratislava in Slovenia.”

“We do all of our own line maintenance here in Australia,” Alliance’s Lee Schofield says, adding that following the 2015 closure of the airline’s Brisbane heavy maintenance base, Alliance also does “a small amount of heavy maintenance. Most of our heavy maintenance is performed by Austrian Technik Bratislava.”

Bratislava might sound like an unlikely destination for heavy maintenance, but it’s at least partly the result of the 2015 purchase by Alliance of 21 Fokker 100 and 70 aircraft from Austrian Airlines.

For Alliance, Schofield explains, the purchase “was a combination of supporting the ongoing operation of Fokker aircraft by Alliance and other operators in the region, giving us some additional revenue streams and positioning ourselves for expansion through a readily available source of additional aircraft. The aircraft acquisitions also dovetailed nicely into other areas of cooperation with the Austrian Airlines group, including the heavy maintenance that they perform on our aircraft.”

“With the benefit of hindsight,” Schofield says, “it has been an excellent transaction in all respects and one that has positioned Alliance very well for the future. At the time it was obviously a large transaction for us but it is now hard to picture the company without having done the deal.”

Of those aircraft purchased, “some of the aircraft are still in service with Austrian Airlines, some are parked in Bratislava, at Austrian Airlines heavy maintenance facility, we have sold three of the aircraft, one has been parted out, and one has come into Alliance’s operational fleet here in Australia,” Schofield outlines. “One of the great things about the transaction is that we now have a pipeline of aircraft available to us and we can make an individual investment decision with respect to each of them.”

“At present, eight of the aircraft are in service with Alliance, Austrian Airlines or other operators, three more are destined to come into the Alliance fleet in the coming months, one has been parted out and the remainder are awaiting a decision as to what we do with them. We are lucky to be spoilt for choice in this regard,” Schofield concludes.

The Fokker 100 has at least another ten years of service in Australian skies

“I believe there is still a long future ahead in Australia,” Fokker Services’ Peter van Oostrum tells Australian Aviation. “Alliance in particular has made public that they’d like to continue operating the airplane for the next decade or so. Given what fuel price are these days, given their expertise, given the load of airplanes that they have, given this sort of general operating profile, I believe they are indeed in a very good position to continue operating the airplane for the next decade. The same pretty much holds for the other two large operators of Network and Virgin Australia, as well.”

“I believe we have at least another ten years in our current fleet type,” Alliance CEO Lee Schofield confirms. “We are only a third of the way through the usable life of the fleet, so we will never actually get to a physical obsolescence. It will be operating economics that determine when a fleet change is in order. While the foreseeable future will most likely see flying to the same kind of markets, I’d also like to think we will find new markets in which to operate as well.”

Of course, with strikingly low fuel prices, the operating economics for the Fokker 100’s Australian missions remain impressive. “We don’t have any immediate plans to change the Fokker 100 fleet as they are well suited to our current requirements and the fly in fly out markets that we operate,” Virgin Australia Regional Airlines CEO Merren McArthur says.

I believe we have at least another 10 years in our current fleet type. Lee Schofield

“Generally speaking,” Fokker Services’ van Oostrum explains, “the airplane will continue to provide sterling service in markets which need 100-seaters, and probably do not require 3,000 flight hours on a yearly basis per airplane. It will always sort of be a medium level utilisation.”

“The rest of the world is pretty much the same picture,” van Oostrum says. “We’ve seen the airplanes move to operators which have a sort of medium level utilisation, typically a bit more than in Australia. Some of them are even pushing 2,000 flight hours on a yearly basis and making money. We’ve seen some airplane conversions. Some aircraft have been converted to VIP use a few years back. That may still happen, though I’m skeptical — though never say never.”

“We’ve had an airplane being converted for a French military user,” the testing and evaluation outfit DGA Essais en Vol, van Oostrum explains, “and they’re testing new radars. We’ve put new wing pylons on the airplanes so they can test various types of ordinance, special mission ports, and what have you. So they definitely have a long future for that airplane.”

The market for 100-seat regional airliners is increasingly crowded, with the Bombardier CRJ and CSeries, Embraer E-Jet and E2 families, Mitsubishi MRJ, Sukhoi Superjet, Comac ARJ21, and indeed lingering older designs like the BAe 146/Avro RJ — plus smaller versions of the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 family — all potentially competing with the Fokker 100 at some level.

Yet with the price of oil, oversupply in the regional airliner market, and the end of the resources boom, the Fokker 100 looks set to remain a fixture of Australian aviation for years to come.