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Ex-Skytrans chief executive Alan Milne could potentially end up competing with his former company as he aims to turn his charter airline East Air into a major regional player.
Speaking exclusively to Australian Aviation, Milne – who bought East Air after leaving Skytrans, now SmartLynx Australia, earlier this year – said the carrier’s first route from Cairns to Hamilton Island is only the beginning, with plans to become “a dominant player in the regional market” in Queensland.
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“East Air has been around for close to 15 years now strictly as a charter operator based in Cairns, very successful. They’ve been going well,” he said.
“The current owners, a husband and wife team, have decided it’s their time to back out, although they’ve both decided now – seeing what we’re doing with it – that actually they might like to hang around a little bit and join in.
“We had the opportunity to expand into a regular public transport operation. We have always thought that Cairns direct to Hamilton Island would be a good route, and so we thought, well, East Air currently has the Beechcraft 1900 that we can employ on that service with the intention to upgrade both frequency and capacity as we rebuild the market.”
While East Air currently operates two Beechcraft 1900s, Milne intends to expand the fleet with around four to five Dash-8 aircraft by the middle of next year, with the aircraft potentially to come from those recently offloaded by QantasLink.
“Qantas have recently sold their Dash-8 Q300s to a leasing company in Canada. Those are currently sitting in Alice Springs, and there’s an opportunity there to either purchase or lease those planes, so that’s one option we’re looking at,” he said.
“There’s planes – 100s, 200s, 300s – available overseas. We’re looking at those as well. We’ll just see where the best opportunity is for us with that fleet, and then we’ll move forward with that.”
According to Milne, East Air will not pursue rapid growth but will look for opportunities for route and fleet expansion as they come.
“It’s all about growth into this area. I think we’ve got a good opportunity. We’ve got access to the planes.”
“It’s going to be gentle – we don’t want to go too hard, too fast, but we want to just make sure we make the right decisions around route pairings and whatever contracts we can go after as well. So, it will be continued, controlled growth, I think, is the best way to put it.”
East Air will begin year-round Cairns-Hamilton Island flights starting 3 November, initially three times per week but moving to more frequent flights on larger aircraft according to demand. This will be the first time any airline has flown between the two holiday destinations since before the pandemic.
