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Comment – Qantas SP Implications
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Time For Qantas To Watch Its Six O’clock?
Exactly a year ago in AADR, we made a comment as to the long-term future of Qantas. At that time It did not really take a mystic to propheslse that the domestics were getting tired of merely flying within continental Australia and that if Qantas saddled Itself with a one-type aircraft fleet then It would inevitably pay a heavy penalty for doing so.
Early in 1980, this was a fair comment. The fact that a year later virtually everybody in the aerospace industry is expressing polite disbelief at the purchase of Boeing 747SP aircraft instead of more applicable designs such as the Tristar 500 or Airbus A300: that is, everybody except Qantas management, is testimony to the future problems about to afflict our national carrier.
Very few airlines, particularly the international carriers, operate one-type fleets. A multiplicity of routes, seasonal influences and traffic patterns necessitate that a successful carrier must be flexible in order to maintain high relative load factors on as many sectors as possible in both schedule planning and by using the most applicable aircraft type for the route in question. No matter which way you look at it, an SP, fine aircraft that it is, is hardly the ideal type for mere trans-Tasman hauls into diminutive Wellington or Townsville. To use what is specifically by design the world’s longest-range aircraft for what is less than continental range sectors is difficult to understand. With an installed thrust in excess of 200,000 lb an SP has to use one helluva lot more fuel to get from, say, Sydney to Wellington than would a twin-engined Airbus with half as much thrust, or even a Tristar – you don’t have to be an economics PhD to comprehend that! In addition to mere fuel consumption (important now, but how much more important when after eventually reaches a dollar a litre!), the maintenance man-hours required on a four-engined aircraft are simply another cost burden forced upon the operator.
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