China Southern joins Sydney's A380 club | Plane Talking
China Southern joins Sydney’s A380 club, promises cold beer
China Southern in crisis over serving warm beer to Australian passengers. Vows to lower the temperature as it brings its A380s to Sydney and 787s to Auckland.
China Southern A380 gets hosed at Sydney Airport: Supplied photo
It would have seemed superfluous to those caught in this morning’s unforecast deluges across parts of Sydney, but China Southern took its own watery initiation when it joined the airport’s A380 club when it arrived amid what was a very wet peak hour for some drivers.
The daily A380 it now flies to Sydney from Guangzhou coincided with its launching of Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner flights to Auckland. Needless to say, ‘they’ are watching intently, not just in Qantas and Air New Zealand, but in Cathay Pacific, since the rise and rise of nearby Guangzhou as a well connected China hub with a very good modern airport is not just an issue affecting its Australian services, but its marketing of Hong Kong as a gateway to the PRC.
It’s also a case possibly getting circled by A380s. With Qantas soon to go daily with A380s from Sydney to Hong Kong and China Southern now daily to it rival neighbour, the frequency versus size card may start to look like less of a game winner given the very high probability of strong growth in the China to Australia market, never mind the much smaller one in the the other direction (in time).
Can Cathay Pacific afford to leave passengers behind for others if it only [has] slots for four A333s a day on the Sydney route until it replaces them with 777-300ERs (which it needs for other longer routes) or A350-900s and -1000s later in the decade, when the game might just be over?
Not everything has gone China Southern’s way however. Today it also to its credit admitted to ‘cultural’ problems with serving warm beer to Australians flying its new Canton Route to London. Now that’s a reputational crisis if ever there was one, but China’s biggest airline is resolved that it will no longer be warm beer on board, although maybe it will have to make an exception for any Pommie passengers.