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Issue #401: Blindsided
Did Bonza get a bum rap?
It would have been the Australian aviation story of 2024 – the sudden and spectacular disintegration of Australia’s newest jet airline – were it not for the sudden and spectacular disintegration of Rex’s domestic jet operations just a couple of months later. Yet, while Rex limped on with government support and eventually found a new buyer for its Saab operations, Bonza suffered the ignominy of losing all its leased aircraft and being consigned, as with so many Aussie airlines before it, to the dustbin of history. The prevailing narrative since then has been that Bonza was an insane idea, its business model would never work, and its planes were simply too large – but is that necessarily so?
Bonza’s former CEO, Tim Jordan, has largely kept his counsel for the last two years, understandably wishing to avoid the limelight; in April, however, having taken the time to breathe and recuperate, he was finally ready to talk about what went wrong. The resulting interview was, we think, one of the best Australian Aviation Podcasts we’ve ever done, and Jake Nelson in our cover feature lets Tim relate the Bonza story from his perspective: what happened, why it happened, and what he could have done differently. It’s a raw look into the behind-the-scenes toll that Bonza’s collapse took on all the “Legends” who believed in the dream, and if you find the feature insightful, we highly recommend you go check out the full conversation in our podcast.
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