Ken:
Well Sunfish, I've news for you! Go do some research of Qantas schedules during the 1970s and you will see that flights to/from London and Southern Europe all routed out and in via MEL with SYD being at the start and end of the route. You call that Sydney-centric? As for BNE, they enjoyed a BNE/SIN service that connected in SIN to/from LHR.
As you mentioned Ansett, at what airport were there International B747s based and did they ever go near Melbourne? Like Qantas, Ansett would have, or should have, followed the money.
Ken, I've patiently explained the situation years ago on Pprune, but here is a shortened version again.
1. The MEL's (minimum equipment list) for B747 of that era allowed the carriage of most defects for a period of 24 hours. That means that the aircraft had to call somewhere capable of fixing things every 24 hours. Long haul to Australia as 20+ hrs meant that outside of Singapore, Cathay, air new Zealand, garuda and Malaysian, European and American carriers had to rely on QF to service their aircraft in Australia. It was called a TFC (terminating flight check).
2. In practice this meant, as you correctly stated, that every B747 had to transit Sydney inbound or outbound. This was living hell at the end of a 20+ hour flight from Heathrow or New York (they had already taken the red eye to LAX). Deplane,,wait for the aircraft to be cleaned, serviced and reprovisioned - usually three hours in transit, then back on for a one hour Melbourne flight.
This created a perception in international travellers minds that Sydney is three hours closer to New York and London than the rest of Australia. This lead to new foreign IT and Banking investment to flow disproportionately to Sydeny.
Please also note that the heavily regulated Australian market did not allow foreign carriers to capitalise on this situation.
3.The European and American carriers did not like this situation either. They were being robbed blind by Qantas for servicing. I had letters of support from Lufthansa and others who were eager to differentiate their product from Qantas by offering more direct flights to/from Melbourne without a Sydney transit.
4. Ansett was in a position to break the Qantas monopoly on TFC's. We were spending upwards of $80 million on new facilities and capabilities to handle wide body aircraft as we were the first Internatonal customer for the B767.
That meant a new test cell for big engines, new avionics facilities (glass cockpit) virtually the whole engineering establishment had to be upgraded to take big stuff - including the training licencing and endorsements for hundreds of LAMES. All this stuff was of the same calibre as the B 747.
5. My back of the envelope budgetting indicated we could break the QF B747 TFC monopoly for about an additional $17 million in additional B747 specific licencing, etc. To me this made sense because it leveraged off of our considerable investment in B767 capabilities and helped defray the costs of our entire wide body exercise. It was also good from the point of view of providing a win/win with foreign airlines and the State of Victoria.
When I first raised this at one of the Director of Engineering’s regular meetings, I was fobbed off as if I had farted in Church. A few weeks later I tried again with a more developed proposal to get permission to start spending money to flesh this out in detail. ie: talk to Boeing and GE for starters.
The Director of Engineering said nothing. He looked at my boss Ron Bush. Bushy leaned over to me and said "if we try and break the Qantas monopoly on Sydney TFC's, Abeles will have our guts for garters. Drop it". The penny dropped.