Delays force Ansett losses up . . . .Terry McCrann . .Courier-Mail. .14feb02
NEW figures confirm Ansett's losses are running well above the $6 million a week predicted by the carrier's administrators.
The confidential internal figures show Ansett Mark II continues to bleed badly as talks continue on the airline's desperately needed sale.
Ansett's planes are flying two-thirds empty – and the few passengers it has are paying less than $100 a ticket on average.
On Tuesday, the figures show, the airline flew just 3254 passengers who generated just $320,000 in revenue.
The passenger load was less than a third the number of customers now flying Virgin Blue each day – and an even smaller portion of Virgin's daily revenues.
Before it failed in September, Ansett was five to six times the size of Virgin.
The airline is now barely a third its size.
The airline's desperate financial state goes a long way to explaining the frantic efforts by would-be Ansett owners Solomon Lew and Lindsay Fox to forge some sort of deal with Virgin.
Ansett is bleeding money at the rate of at least $1.5 million every day, and its cash costs could be running as high as $2 million a day.
The single-day loss for Tuesday would have been between $1.2 million and $1.7 million. That would have brought total cash losses for the 12 days of February so far to between $13 million and $19 million.
Added to that are the non-cash costs, such as the fees still to be charged by administrators Mark Mentha and Mark Korda.
The internal figures show that in the 12 days since the start of the month, Ansett has flown a total of only 54,000 passengers, an average of around 4500 each day.
Total revenue for the 12 days, according to the official Ansett figures, was just $5.3 million.
That left a cash loss of as much as $19 million for a period of less than two weeks.
That suggests it will be all-but impossible for the two Marks to keep the total February loss down to their predicted $24 million, if the sale saga drags on to the end of the month.
The February loss should have been incurred by Fox and Lew, as Ansett was supposed to have been sold to them at the end of January.
Instead, it will come out of the pockets of Ansett creditors, who will be lucky to get even a cent in the dollar, far less than the 5¢ indicated by the administrators.
If the Lew-Fox deal now fell over, the creditors would get nothing and Ansett staff would lose a sizeable part of their entitlements.
It emerged yesterday that controversial negotiations over the Sydney Airport domestic terminal lease were heading towards a conclusion after the airport operators received information on Tesna's deal with unions using Ansett's Sydney terminal as security for employees' entitlements.
Sydney Airports Corporation Limited spokesman Peter Gibbs said the issue, which was identified as a sticking point, had been dealt with.
. .The administrators and Tesna principals Mr Fox and Mr Lew have indicated they would like the matters settled by the end of the week.
Additional reporting by AAP
. .I'd be trying to keep that vey quiet, the Adminstrators futures and personal fortunes are now entirely in Tesna's hands for their own survival and must be pleading, begging or adopting other unseemly postures to get Tesna to complete.. .So who then is now looking after the creditors.. .The ACTU?? they are in the same gunsights.. .So the sale completes, if what Mr McCrann suggests is so and I would bet it is, there are going to be some very very angry creditors.
Silence, of course there is, have you ever tried speaking with a mouth full of feathers. <img src="rolleyes.gif" border="0">