Buckshot...
Agreed. I was speaking with an EK staffer a couple of years back who said that they noticed early on how tough it was for the sub-continental communities in the UK/Europe to get back to their old countries and vice-versa... firm bilateral agreements, horrible scheduling, etc. that they decided they could make zillions by connecting all the major cities in that region to Dubai, then lots of runs up from DXB, especially to the UK.
Well, EK now have SEVEN daily runs up to London alone, TWO dailies to Manchester and single dailies to Birmingham & Glasgow.
This was before the non-stop DXB-SYDs but the 345s were on the way & he told me to just wait & see what happened when that caper kicked off... Sure enough, EK will shortly be adding a second daily to SYD (ok, not non-stop but that probably won't be far off).
Point is, EK have made it work in spades. They took their successful sub-continent strategy and thought, 'Gee, this might work further afield with longer-range aircraft' - and it has.
I recently went up to London via Vienna with Austrian/Lauda, in J. Not a great product, but I was initially kinda surprised to see J/C FULL (so pretty much paying for the operation), whilst Y/C would've been lucky to be 60%. Speaking to a few fellow punters, they said they always used to fly the Rat but they were going to points in Germany and France and did NOT want to travel backwards from London - so Vienna was great, as OS had recently made big strides in getting connections tight at VIE. The point was also made that getting points bookings on QF had become such a nightmare that they were happier in a Star FF programme, eg. if they wanted to take the fam pretty much anywhere in Asia-Pac, there was usually choice on the main runs. So that was clearly premium traffic which the Rat had just given away but not fully understanding what & where its punters wanted.
Keg - maybe you're right - maybe getting 777s & dumping the older 744s would introduce a bit more fleet flexibility, opening up thinner routes. Maybe, using 777LRs going through DXB, BAH, BOM, MLE, KUL etc. to European cities would be a way of relieving the reliance on SIN, and so weaken Singapore's bargaining position to get West Coast USA routes - and open up the Continental ports again (crewed by London-based crew??!!). But, SIN remains a good hub to aggregate from other Australian cities for LHR, so it won't disappear just yet. I've suggested before that QF go to such intermediate ports & connect with BA runs to those ports - no need for extra LHR slots or LR/ER aircraft.
But if all the 744s went, what would happen to JNB? Would it have sufficient loads to fill a 380? SYD-JNB is outside even 207 min ETOPS by great circle.
TD67