Well some one has to pay for those pilots exorbitant wages.
Rex.
Let's say there's 4 X 15 man-hours for the SYD - DXB bit and 3 X 8 man-hours for the DXB - LHR bit , plus a bit of overtime. That would be around 100 hours pay to be paid to the pilots. Then let's say the average for the crew is $250/hr - it would be comfortably less than that, but let's just use that.
Total crew cost for the 2 legs would be $25000. Now lets say all of the other airline's crew costs are half of that.:roll eyes:
If there's 400 punters on the jet, Qantas therefore is shelling out about $31/passenger in additional crew costs. Not quite $4100....
I don't think it's crew costs that produce the discrepancy.