The Australian air travel market is littered with the proverbial corpses of airlines which failed trying to provide a cheap alternative to Qantas and Virgin. But a new competitor is hoping to buck the trend with experience at the big airlines and leaning on the new Western Sydney International Airport set to open for commercial flights later this year.
Headed by former Qantas Loyalty boss, Peter Kelly, the newly-announced Zinc Airlines hopes the new airport will help relieve cost and operating pressures that limited carriers such as Tiger, Bonza and Compass.
“People put me down as the frequent flyer guy — which I was, but I have a large amount of operational experience, starting at airports, and I have overseen two startups in Europe,” Kelly told 7NEWS.com.au. He said the opening of the new airport “breaks the nexus” as Sydney’s once-sole airport, Kingsford Smith, had time slot and gate constraints which made it hard for new airlines to get off the ground.
“A new startup could never get the required slots to enable them to get sufficient utilisation of their aircraft assets,” Kelly said. “Absent the opening of WSI we would not consider starting up a new domestic airline in Australia.”
Zinc Airlines is preparing to be the latest budget airline to try and break into the Australian air travel market. Kelly has also watched previous attempts to break into the market fail to address a number of other issues that put them on the back foot against Qantas and Virgin which together control about 98 per cent of the market.
Among the issues Zinc hopes to address is its plane type, electing to stock its fleet solely with a single aircraft in order to bring down costs and reduce complexity. “Zinc will operate a single fleet type — the Airbus A321neo — on a focused network of high-frequency trunk routes,” Zinc said. “A novel base-assigned operating model, unprecedented in the Australian context, keeps aircraft productive, crew costs lean and overnight complexity eliminated. The model is stress-tested. The team is ready.”
The airline hopes anchoring out of the new Western Sydney Airport will help limit cost and time pressures that would otherwise curb budget carriers. The airline will model itself off of European budget alternative RyanAir which tries to keep aircrafts full and airborne as often as possible. Zinc hopes to achieve this by anchoring routes out of Western Sydney International, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane — all of which don’t have limiting curfews such as Sydney Airport.
“We plan to be a price leader and a disrupter and bring necessary competition to the Australian domestic air travel market — and we are structured to go head to head with Jetstar,” Kelly told 7NEWS.com.au. “The Qantas Group and Virgin Australia will not welcome our presence but we thrive in competition. But it is all moot if we are unable to get the necessary funding. Not an easy task.” He said the process to entice investors would take “months, not weeks” before the year-long endeavour to be granted an Air Operator’s Certificate from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Passenger flights out of Western Sydney International Airport begin in October this year.
