Originally Posted by
Icarus2001
My recollection back to the Jetstream and Fokker 50 days was that RPT was the BASE for Skywest, not FIFO. That came later. There was only ONE jet charter operator at Perth airport and that was NJS. Alliance started with one F100 to Mt Keith. Skywest were late to the FIFO party.
XR was doing FIFO for Rio Tinto's Argyle Diamond mine before QQ came west - that was what got them into F100s in the first place. When QQ came west, they wanted to be able to tap XR's parts store.
That aside, if you are not making money doing FIFO, you're doing it wrong. RPT is much harder as the operator bears all the risk. Rex are buggered because they haven't kept up with the market when it comes to pay, and now whine about losing pilots and engineers to those who are willing to pay more. If they couldn't see that coming a few months ago and did something about it, then it is their own damn fault. And with Qantas moving onto the Rex network they should have done something about it rather than just whine and cut routes. That's what management should be paid for, you would think.