Could this be the forunner to a merger, acquisition of ******. 25 airframes seems to be an awful lot of airframes, considering only a handful of their fleet are A models.
A marcair/Rex joint venture would be a formidable competitor. 80 aircraft fleet would bring enormous ecconomies of scale and would surely scare the pants of Eastern, even Qantas/Virgin.
From there, it would only be a simple matter(reklativey speaking) to upgrade to a High Capacity AOC and lease a dozen or so 737's to link up the capital city hubs, ie., Adeaide, Melbourne,Sydney, Brisbane, Townsville and Cairns.
This scenario is emminently feasuble as the fixed costs are already paid for and it would nly be the marginal cost of the aircraft, crew and fuel etc.
Before anyone attacks me, the market is still growing at around 5% year on year, additionally there is a huge on-carriage from Rex to other airlines and vica versa. Trunk routes would simply keep their existing pax on their own trunk flight raher than interlining to Virgin/Qantas.eg pax going Orange to Brisbane curently flies rex to Sydney then transfers to Virgin/Qantas.
Going to be very interesting times ahead.