Singapore Air tells Qantas to share
By Scott Rochfort in Toulouse
January 20, 2005
Singapore Airlines chief executive Chew Choon Seng took some time off from Tuesday night's launch of the Airbus 380 super jumbo to launch his most vocal attack to date on the Qantas stranglehold on the Sydney to Los Angeles route.
With federal Transport Minister John Anderson set to reopen the long-stalled Open Skies talks with the Singapore Government in the middle of next month, Mr Chew used part his keynote speech on the A380 to extol the virtues of operating such a plane on a route that Singapore cannot fly, Sydney to Los Angeles.
To drive home his point, Mr Chew called two press conferences. One dealt with Singapore Air's taking delivery of the first A380 early next year; the other was on the airline's desire to fly from the Australian east coast to the United States.
Qantas and United are the only airlines with permission to fly direct services on the route.
"When we put in our bid for access to trans-Pacific operations beyond Australia we were asked to be patient initially and to await the return of stability to the industry post 9/11, post Bali attacks and so on," Mr Chew said.
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Advertisement"Subsequent to that we were also asked to take a raincheck [by the Howard Government] until the elections were over. Lately we were told that it would take 12 to 18 months, so we're hoping to have a manifestation of that going forward."
Asked why he decided to call a press conference on the issue, Mr Chew said: "Sometimes the message doesn't get through, so we thought we should be repeating it one more time. We are rewinding and replaying the same message."
Mr Chew said the arrival of Singapore Air on the route would stimulate more passenger traffic, particularly from the US, which he said had largely been stymied by the lack of capacity and high Qantas fares on the route.
While Mr Chew declined to indicate how far he saw fares falling if Singapore Air entered the route, he noted the law of supply and demand as a major factor.
"There's limited supply on the route and strong demand."
In relation to Qantas's plans to deploy its first A380 on the US route, Mr Chew said: "I think it's no secret that that's the one route on which there's relatively [little] competition for Qantas and where the yields are very high, so therefore a combination of lower costs and very high fares; it's natural for anybody [to make good profits]."
Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon, who happened to be sitting next to Mr Chew at the A380 briefing, said granting Singapore Air rights to fly to the US would be unfair, given that Qantas is restricted in the flights it can operate from Singapore. He noted Qantas was restricted to three-times weekly services to Paris, compared with Singapore's twice daily services.
But Mr Chew said: "The truth of the matter is that at the moment we have no ability to operate beyond Australia on a long-haul basis.
"But Qantas on the other hand, for a long time and at the moment, is operating beyond Singapore to currently Frankfurt and Heathrow no less than 24 times a week [through Singapore]."
"We have zero, zilch, nothing."
Mr Chew said Singapore Airlines was still interested in developing an A380 maintenance facility with Qantas, and other A380 customers Thai Airways and Malaysia Airlines.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/...110810741.html
. I think they still have some "Direct" though not non-stop services from Australia to USA. So that would make SG the third *A carrier to operate the route. No wonder *A needs so many carriers if two of them can't make a go of such a lucrative route like Aus-USA.
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