Or : overseas passengers simply prefer Sydney?
I hate the place, and I live there!

Sydney is a **** hole. Looking at the inter state net migration statistics in the last couple of years, it seems more people are waking up to this fact. Cant wait to get out of here myself once my land/apartments settles in mel.

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.

0% of Qantas B787s currently planned to be based in Sydney.

Not a strong argument Sunfish!

I lived in Sydney in the late 90s and for a two year secondment few years back. I was so desperate to get out that place I begged my boss for a secondment of my already secondment to go to another base. Two things which really irked me this decade over the last was traffic gridlock and the immigration invasion (advice is don't go to Blacktown unless armed).

I just don't understand the pull factor of place. It's just dirty and miserable, it screams rip me off everywhere you go. Melbourne just wipes it off the map.

Beauty, less Victorians to ruin it :}

How exactly is international standard business class with lie flat beds from SYD, BNE and MEL to PER an 'LCC' product???

Oh stop talking absolute rubbish... Qantas operated daily via SIN to europe all through the 80s and into the 90s... the only 'one stop' service to Europe in the late 70s/early 80s went SYD/MEL/PER/BOM/LHR... the premier 'one stop' service from the East Coast was QF9/10 using 747-338s and it went SYD/MEL/BOM/LHR... to top that off, as well as QF6 operating daily from FRA into SIN then on to MEL, THEN SYD, QF2 also operated direct into MEL a couple of days a week.

In the days of direct West Coast USA, no aircraft had the range to do the extra bit from MEL to LAX instead of SYD-LAX but QF17 operated if not daily, then 4-5 times a week ex MEL to NAN and HNL... QF25 to HNL and YVR... from BNE, as well as QF51 direct to SIN to join up with QF1.

You need to do some research before you say these things. Qantas' first ever round-the-world service for about the first 10 years originated and terminated at MEB. It was only the lack of MEB to handle the B707 that stopped it from originating MEL. Yes, a number of flights also operated ex MEL via SYD because most of them could not manage a full load on a 747 so one aircraft went on beyond SYD and some pax joined other flights.

MEL always had direct HKG flights, direct SIN flights and flights direct to ports in Indonesia.
'

"Or : overseas passengers simply prefer Sydney?"

Well that's the place with the headline attractions (or rather images) - Harbour, Bridge, Opera House etc etc but most overseas people who know Australia generally prefer Melbourne I think

Sunfish I even remember as a kid in the mid 90's, flying on QF10 LHR-SIN-MEL-SYD. Yes, I'm pretty sure the QF10 continued to SYD back then.

You continually spruik bull**** on here about your hate for Qantas. I don't give a toss whether you like them or not, but do we have to read about it all the time? And the **** you carry on about isn't even factual.

Ken:
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.

[QUOTE=morno;9879816]Sunfish I even remember as a kid in the mid 90's, flying on QF10 LHR-SIN-MEL-SYD. Yes, I'm pretty sure the QF10 continued to SYD back then.


Late 80's , early 90's - LH,AZ,JU,OA,KL and MH arrived MEL first, trundled up to SYD, back to MEL then back to Europe

Sunfish, I'm not sure whether or not all that justifies many years and seemingly thousands of posts full of spittle-flecked anti-QF diatribes, but a bloke's gotta have a hobby, I suppose. Carry on.

Sunfish is writing unmitigated nonsense! I don't know if he's trying to be deceptive by re-writing history or if old age is catching up with him. :ugh:

QF2 operated from LHR via various routings to SIN, thence SYD and terminated in MEL. Scheduled arrival time in Sydney was 0620 local while its scheduled departure time for MEL was 0800 local. By my calculation, this is a transit of
1 hr 40 mins which is substantially less than the three hours Sunfish suggests. Not only that, if the flight was late arriving into SYD, the QF standard required a transit of something like 70 minutes or whatever required to meet the 0800 departure time.

I will say no more other than to suggest Sunfish (1) re-reads the post of Aerial Perspective, and (2) have a Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down! :}

AP,

My memory says that these were operated by RR powered -238s. And weren't they an operational headache ex MEL with the 'cooking fire' forecasts for BOM?

This is the city with the airport that has no train station at the airport and a road widening scheme that is taking three years to complete. Sydney isn't that bad, but it is a little expensive. No different than comparing any other main financial centre of any other country i.e New York/London.

They sure were... I remember the fuel capacity of 164,500kg on the 743 and remember looking at loadsheets on just about every flight with 164,500kg - also a pain with oversales at the beginning as they were very popular and always full.

My memory is that it took until the 743 to have the range to do the flight... the 743s were RR powered (VH-EBT, U, V, W, X and Y) but I do remember the 742s operating via BOM from PER.

You may be right however, but I thought they started when the 743s arrived. Remember well the cooking fires at BOM. Also remember one QF10 having a birdstrike or engine out on take-off before V1 at BOM and bursting a large number of tyres coming to a stop... heard about it on a QF23 to PER from the Crew a week later. Come to think if it that might have been a 742.

B747-200 were operating to London via Perth,Bombay from at least 1976.

Seem to remember QF doing a MAN-LHR leg as well on the way to SYD/MEL. Anyone remember where the stop-offs were?

In 1982 I flew on QF5 which routed MEL PER BOM ATH FCO FRA,
and a few years later in 1985 flew QF10 MAN AMS ATH BKK MEL, both 747/200s