1) QR is planning to introduce services to Australia at the end of this year, as an extension of current services to KUL and CGK.
There was mention of that in the Kuala Lumpur press, TPE and MNL have also been mentioned as extensions of KUL. The CEO of QR has said on more than one occasion that QR will never fly to the US or Australia since these routes will never be profitable, I guess he had a change of plan. FI or AW said once that QR were not allowed rights to fly into SYD but were offered MEL instead mainly because of pressures exerted by Qantas
2) In order to undertake such routings which would not be desirable on the A300, QR may wet lease in additional A330 capacity. It is rumored that Aer Lingus will be the nominated supplier.
It makes sense since Aer Lingus can live without one of their A330's. Also EI's A330's are CF-6 equiped which will make things easier if QR would take the aircraft on dry lease.
3) Is it true that during certain weather conditions, the A300 cannot fly directly from DOH to CMN (hence recent needs for tech stops at Tunis-Carthage)? If this is the case, and since the flights to Milan and ALL flights to LHR are now supposed to operate on the A330, how can QR handle this business with only two of the type? Its impossible.
Actually only two of the Milan flights are on the A330 and according to the Reservation system the flights will revert to A300 later on. After October the LHR flights will also revert to 9x weekly and I assume the MON and SAT flights will go back to the A300. This will free up one of the A330-200's to do CMN for 3 says of the week and then possibly do a Euro or Asian routes.
It is interesting to note that the CMN route was scheduled to switch over to the A332 on August 1st but never did which was a surprise. I guess they needed capacity in MXP.
Anyway two A330-200's are scheduled to arrive in the First Quarter of next year this should ease up the load on the fleet.
5) QR are in talks to start flying to TIP, TUN and possibly Algiers;
Add MRU, SEZ, MAN, JNB, SHJ, THR, SLL, HYD, COK and NYC.
6) QR are considering weekly rotations to Glasgow and Birmingham (UK), where there is currently limited capacity for large Asian communities travelling to Pakistan and India, without needing to stop twice in transit (situation worse from GLA than from BHX which is now served by EK and PIA.)
I think 1x weekly flights make no business sense. If it is a leisure route or VFR route they need at least 3x weekly if they want anychance at attracting J class passengers with good yeilds they need at least 4x weekly frequencies. Imagine all the infrastructure that is to be laid in BHX and GLA for the flights and with not enough flights to spread the costs especially since QR are aiming for lower yeilding VFR Asian traffic I doubt the routes will be a success.