Jake Nelson

Ella Watson from Western Australia, and Spencer Holmes and Joshua Kilgour from Queensland, will each receive up to $5,000 to go towards earning their Civil Aviation Safety Regulation (CASR) Part 66 engineer licences.

The low-cost carrier is set to name the new plane ‘Matilda’ after the Matildas football team, which reached the FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final this year. It will join Bonza’s four other 737 MAX 8 aircraft, which are nicknamed ‘Bazza’, ‘Shazza’, ‘Sheila’ and ‘Malc’.

Starting on 8 December, the airline will fly three return services per week from Melbourne to Noumea, operating Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday services on its Airbus A320neo aircraft.

The carrier will continue to operate services from Perth to Albany, Esperance, and Carnarvon and Monkey Mia, while regional airline Skippers Aviation will retain its Perth–Laverton–Leonora and Perth–Wiluna–Meekatharra–Mount Magnet routes.

Speaking to Murray Jones on 4CA Cairns on Tuesday, Minister King mentioned the industry’s ongoing skills shortage, saying airlines had let staff go and many people had not returned to aviation, and added that this was also a problem at Airservices.

The partnership with Enterprise, which has flown Antarctic services in a fleet of DHC-6 Twin Otter and DC-3T Basler aircraft since 2001, follows a similar announcement earlier this month of an exclusive partnership with Helicopter Resources Pty Ltd.