Plans unveiled for ‘Ryanair-style’ airline at Western Sydney Airport

According to Kelly, Zinc would fly between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane initially before potentially expanding to the Gold Coast, with a fleet of solely Airbus A321neo aircraft, with fares cheaper than Jetstar’s.

The airline would launch within 17 months of securing funding – $100 million from investors and $100 million in debt.

“One of the main features of an ultra-low-cost carrier model is its efficiency. Some think it’s about not paying staff and low costs; it’s not. Our model is about sweating the assets and running the planes for 12 hours a day minimum,” he told the Australian Financial Review.

“Jetstar is operating a larger model with the number of places they fly to – the type of network they have, with a large number of aircraft and places, they can’t apply the same model.”

On its website, Zinc says Kelly has watched the failures of Compass, Impulse, Tiger Airways, Bonza, and Rex’s domestic jet operations, and labels each as “predictable”.

“The business models were flawed from inception – and [Kelly] could articulate exactly why, long before the market rendered its verdict,” the website says.

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“Structural slot and gate constraints of SYD. Structural cost disadvantage. Undercapitalisation. The wrong aircraft. The wrong routes. The wrong moment. He knows precisely why they failed. Zinc has been engineered so that none of those reasons apply.”

According to Zinc, the opportunity afforded by the opening of WSI later this year “ends a decades-long constraint” on new entrants to the market.

“A single congested, curfewed, slot-constrained airport in Sydney made it functionally impossible for a new entrant to build a genuinely competitive cost base. Incumbents were protected not by superior management but by the scarcity of infrastructure,” the website says.

“For the first time, a new domestic airline can access the Sydney market without the constraints that have defined – and defeated – every previous challenger. Zinc has been designed specifically for this moment. It would not exist without it.”

Kelly told the AFR that the major domestic airlines would “try to make life difficult” for Zinc, but would have to tread carefully to avoid being “guilty of predatory pricing”.

“Operating from Western Sydney also makes it difficult for them because they have to bring capacity from somewhere to do that and potentially lose slots at Sydney – they’re going to rob Peter to pay Paul, so to speak,” he said.

Another new carrier, Bill Astling’s Koala Airlines, could launch this year and, according to Astling, has already secured leases for three 737 MAX 8 aircraft.