Jetstar will be at Avalon for as long as Andrews/Labor is in government, which will probably be forever. Fox is in on the deal also, and is well and truly in bed with Victorian Labor.

A lot of dollars changes hands between Collingwood and Spring st.

The most sustainable option is for Jetstar to pull out and Andrews stop supporting his best mate Fox with our dollars which is just subsidizing loss making airfares, completely pointless exercise.

Unfortunately no government is going to invest in more airport capacity when the buzz word is hyper loop. Eco friendly and high speed.

The set up costs are horrendous and there’s still tech to get sorted but it’s happening. The world is going to plunge billions into tech that reduces carbon and the 1 hour flights over the golden triangle are prime targets.

China only just released a new maglev capable of 600kph, that's Melbourne-Sydney in around 2 hours, which considering it would be walk on/off each end like a commuter train would kill aviation on the route. I really don't know why the tech is super expensive as it can be prefabbed concrete lanes and just placed on basic concrete stumps across the countryside. Of course Australia would make it stop every 10 km at country stations to deliver milk, haul coal or the odd passenger making it never exceed 100kph. Meanwhile the backwards Nationals are still thinking 'high speed rail' is the answer....

Simple answer, which land are you going to put it on? Compulsory buy back? Rail reserve? Huge cost there.

You really think those facts have not been discussed over Cognac and Cigars the last twenty years. Certain business people lobby governments to keep high speed rail off the agenda.

In another view, look at the grief HS2 is giving the UK.

I only meant cost relative to HSR track. Estimates run at about $40-$50 million per km of 500kph maglev track for construction, which would put Melbourne - Sydney at about $50 Billion, give or take a few bil for land and such, much of it could be built directly over existing rail. The Japenese SC Maglev needs straighter track though, although in reality it's speed is not really that much greater than the Chinses system to warrant the extra cost and restrictions.

This is the real issue in Australia going back to facilities. Certain nameless companies thrive on maintaining duopolies by restricting access for competition to expand. This occurs in all fields from telcos to aviation and supermarkets. One master company rules and lets one or two other companys expand enough to keep monopoly fears at bay. Throw in some feigned competition in areas of the business while fleecing the public on other items, and keeping the gov happy by focusing on keeping CPI items at low cost to alleviate wages growth. If your cohort companies step out of line, give them a good smacking of market swamping until they bleed down to a level they pull back and cooperate or go broke and another sucker steps in.

I believe that to be a good summary of the Australian corporate landscape at present,

That will all depend if it is subsidised by the government or not. Rail is uncompetitive with aviation if it is run as a real business like aviation where the customer is paying the full economic price of the ticket. The cost of a ticket on a high speed train would be eye watering if the customer paid the real economic price. For some reason however railways seem to get a free pass in this area. The same people who advocate railways always want the government to pony up regardless of cost or efficiency. High speed rail in Australia is just another white elephant which gets a free pass on economic and environmental grounds. I have never understood why it is always pushed along as some sort of solution when it is quite obviously not.

Bonzas biggest worry will be airport access not High Speed Rail.

In the telecommunications world, legislation was passed that allows a telecommunications company free access to almost any piece of land in the country they choose to put their infrastructure on, in order to give them greater opportunity to compete with the likes of Telstra and NBNco. I know this because I'm one of a few people fighting a telecoms company that have decided our rooftop, beside our pool, would be a good spot to build their "Low Impact facility"; a 3-5m mast with a number of antennae hanging off it.

Morph this into the transport/aviation world and with the right lobbyists you can do almost anything.

How does one calculate the "full economic price" of a fast train ticket?

Much the same way you calculate the full economic price of a maintained road to every possible place. You don't and pretend the cost of driving is just the car and fuel.

Trains become economic on the shear scale of use, when you realise that during peak each train is shoveling 1000+ commuters around the city at a rate of one every few minutes or less. It will be a very long time before planes or cars can produce similar results.

The new HC Metro trains will carry up to 2000 per set. That's about 1000 cars off the road per train assuming an average of 2 per car. Apply that to a properly set up city pair like Melbourne - Sydney and resonable travle time like 2 hours where you are in commuter range, the scale will be there. It's just a matter of initial capital to build it.

Having sampled the fast train service, such as Berne to Paris, train is the way to travel, city centre to city centre, Melbourne to Sydney would be an ideal candidate. See France has banned domestic air travel if there is a direct train service of less than 2½ hours, if only Paris to London was available, 2 h 17 min by train.

No ML-SY how RexJet gonna survive! 😂

What is the "full economic price" of a "fast train ticket" from Sydney to Melbourne?

A number, based on stated assumptions with actual numbers, please.

Here's a ten year old study pulled together by BITRE.

This from page 5 probably covers the economics;

I lost quite a bit of interest when that article said rail and cars have the same environmental footprint, both being less than aviation, with that statement high speed buses is what we need, thousands of them. Again they like to imagine cars travelling around like bubbles, not like a plane spreading nasty contrails and needing huge runways and trains cutting through forests and tunneling and destroying the landscape. No one seems to mention the millions of Kms of tar-sealed roads and the impact they have on the environment, let alone the cost of the roads, bridges street lights and traffic lights and the annual ever increasing budget to maintain such assets. Imagine what the electrical consumption of the road system in Melbourne or Sydney is and how that translate to coal burnt and cost to the community, that's before you take into account the actual car emissions, road emissions and a myriad of other nasty things.

I’d also like to see MAGLEV offer $29 fares to compete with Rex - after all, aren’t we all saying competition is good?

How many of those fares per day would be required to even pay for the running costs, even if the cost of infrastructure was absorbed by the taxpayer?

Actually, how many new power stations would be required enroute to provide the megawatts required? A new coal plant every 100km? MAGLEV is a little bit electrically thirsty, unless there have been new technology leaps I haven’t heard of yet.

Forget high speed trains.
As I said the future is Hyperloop. The decisions on future transport networks are going to be looking well into the future. For domestic travel/freight in 10 years aeroplanes are going to be number 1 target for carbon reduction. There's going to be a massive push for green sustainable transport not just pax but cargo as well. It's going to take time and whole lot of cash but why invest in domestic airports when you can invest in hyperloop. The pods can launch seconds apart to different destinations, no stopping at stations along the way etc and they will operate faster than commercial jets and direct down town. These things are going to have no curfews no waiting to load a full 767, freight can go 24/7 and you can have multiple city stations.
Multiple companies are investing in the tech now, flying in the future won't be cheap. It's going to get smashed by future world Governments to reduce global warming.

Looks suspiciously like a very fast train (in a tube).

Thanks for the linked info, Mick. Good point, 43.

Yep super fast train, levitating on a magnetic field, while in a near vacuum with no driver.

Hyper loop surfers the same constraint as roads and rail, it is limited to the linked cities. Aircraft have the absolute ability to link (almost) any two airports on the planet and can change their plans daily. Tunnels are hideously expensive, crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, mind blowingly so.
Meanwhile in the real world, we have three rail gauges in Australia and a state governement so inept they buy rail cars too big for the tunnels they use.
Edited to add; I just read ferry’s too high to go under bridges on the route they were bought for. Amazing.

Don't forget they can't even maintain a simple standard rail-line, esp in NSW where derailments are still common due to poor track sections. We even had one of our faster interstate trains derail not long ago north of Melbourne, because the track is bad and the train had to slow for a point system and didn't. How the safety system is not automated like the metro system is now is beyond belief. Up until last year during summer, there were still delays due to wooden sleeper fires on key metro lines, how on earth would Australian governments maintain a hyperloop. Maglev is pretty easy, its all automated with almost foolproof tracks and backup battery electrical system on board that can power the train set for 1 hour after power loss to the track (sorry conspiracy theorist that reckon they need nuclear power plants to run, they can run on internal batteries for an amount of time, so unless they have some sort of internal nuclear power plant your theory is defunct.)

And yes any HSR, MagLev or HyperPoop, will need to first only serve Melbourne/Sydney. The economy of scale is just not there for regional connections Intrastate. For it to be viable you could maybe have a stop in Albury or route through Canberra. Although direct Melbourne- Canberra-Sydney would be very expensive to build.

Hyper loop over long distance is just pipe dreams :E just think of the cost and complexity of 1000 km of vacuum pressure pipeline big enough to carry a train, sorry but ain't going to happen in our lifetime.

The name Bonza is also the title for a short Australian film made in 1989 about a dysfunctional family whose lives revolve around their cattle dog called Bonza. The writer David Swann, also penned another great Australian movie called Crackers (1998). It all makes sense when you join the dots.

From last weekend’s The Australian, New budget carrier Bonza has unveiled its slogan as “here for Allstralia”,
as it prepares to finalise its route network.

Future customers want to fly Hobart to Broome and Busselton to Broken Hill!

Living the dream.

Indeed, they should also start a twice weekly service from Forrest (WA) to Forbes (NSW).

Maybe 3 times a week from Emerald to Esperance?

This interview with their CCO should give you warm and fuzzy feelings...

https://tickeroriginals.co/2021/11/2...tion-industry/

The COO makes a solid case for the model she proposes.

If the entire management team have her focus and clear thinking they are quite probably on their way to a sustainable operation. Staying out of the three largest capital cities has merit. Qantas and Virgin may very well leave them alone to stimulate demand, thereafter they may have a shot or two. First to market has advantages and I would say the real battles will appear some many months after launch. Bonza would need to 'see off the heavies' at that first show down and from there, their prosperity will be significantly decided. Rex, may be a bit harder to assess....... could be more their patch and therefore they may want to challenge the new entrant from the beginning.

That said however, regional Australia has been deliberately kept small by government, industry and arguably by us all. The result for aviation means there's just not the aspirational momentum to permanently embed an airline that flies within the VFR market region to region. Basic living infrastructure and services are dismal for a first world country. Industries, whereupon cities and towns trade amongst themselves and therefore sustain themselves, don't exist here. When those foundations become a reality, the airline economics will become more certain. Its probably true to say there was a better chance at something like this fifty years ago.

Even community central hubs are winding back, as the mining and agriculture technology allows more self sufficiency rather than having third party dealers, medical facilities and even fuel and services hubs in a large local town. It can all be kept on site and stuff shipped directly from a major city as required, this by far has made a big impact on the viability of smaller country towns. These large operators relying more on FIFO than any RPT services.

Very true and an all too easy problem to solve.

Why shouldn't government say to banks... be a banking institution in Australia but that means 25% of your branches must be in regional cities and then 25% of those must be in smaller towns. Why shouldn't government say to miners, be a miner in Australia but that means 25% of your workforce must reside in the regions etc. Same with private health providers/ private transport/ etc. etc. Its not unheard of, media laws govern ownership and by default, place of operation - why not for industry generally. Most of all, in time, they all benefit. In fact the early adopters would likely gain significantly as new markets grow. Australia should be a world leader at long distance transport efficiencies and technology. Why? because we had to get good at that to develop our own national opportunities (well, we would in this dream!) Thereafter everything else becomes self sustaining.

Then you'd say, region to region flying looks like a service the nation could use. This is a nation that regularly talks in terms of tens of billions of dollars. In no time that will escalate to hundreds of billions. I don't see this as a big deal. Other nations did this decades or even a century ago. When do we get out of first gear?

Seriously?

How are you going do staff these government mandated banks? 25% of mining workforce forced to live in the regions? Are you going to use the old time pressgangs and barbed wire to get the staff to stay there? In NZ we have a huge problem getting health staff to work on the West Coast and small towns? how are you going to solve that problem?

Oh wait - this is a wind up, right?

What you are talking about is regulation of industry. It's proven to not work, in limited situations it has benefits, such as mine sites like Weipa have quotas of locals that must be met if available before outsiders are brought in. Migrant doctors have to spend time in rural areas first before moving to city areas.

This does not fix the overall problem which is, no one wants to live in these places. Try living in a small rural town with limited social life, soaring temperature in summer and flies that can carry you away like drones. Then you can try the mid sized support towns that are riddled with unemployed and drugs issues, and the heat and flies. 100+ years ago people moved to the country as cities were expensive cesspits of segregated class and crime, the country was a true escape from problems and a new start. There is nothing appealing in the country except for retirees wanting some land and peace. FIFO was the answer because it was way cheaper than what needed to be paid to locate workers to an area in some permanence, and yeah you will get some miners and laborers who see some life in the country. But a high end professionals with family, engineers, doctors, business leaders, nope, they want city life, and the services, luxuries and security that go with it.

Unfortunately the only tested way to make the country more appealing is to run the cities down to a level no one wants to live there.

BTW I grew up in rural Australia, and have spent quite a bit of time in the country.

Now the fun begins. Trying to convince CASA.

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/aust...ed-launch/amp/

PET HATE ALERT. That sentence would be fine without the last two words, unnecessary and pointless.

‘Bonza’ comment I totally agree.

It's pretty obvious that they will choose Busselton Airport as a primary W.A. destination. It is rated CASA 4C and can handle fully loaded aircraft including A320 / 737 and A330. At one stage Jetstar was running flights between Busselton and Melbourne. Busselton is a holiday destination with access to the major wine-growing region of W.A. It's presently running a touch under 40K flights per year for FIFO bit that can be easily expanded.

There is also a plan to run Kalgoorlie Boulder flights but that won't be attractive to Bonza.

The next question is where from? Avalon VIC is quite likely, and SA and NSW airports will likely be involved.

Busselton ‘was’ a holiday destination. Appetite for a holiday to WA will be low if the border opens up next yr. WA tourism will need an open checkbook to entice ppl over.

Has anyone heard how much they are paying? Just wondering if it's worth giving up my truck driving gig or not.

40K flights per year?

That’s over 100 flights per day. A few FIFO’s plus a couple of dozen students doing circuits maybe?

How many flights did they do over what period?
As mentioned by Derfred that is 109 flights per day averaged over a full year, no FIFO on weekends so that makes it more like 150 a day.

What have you been smoking?

Here is the data captured by the Busselton Airport's local council's airport advisory committee.

For the first quarter this year, when it was noted that FIFO was back above pre-pandemic levels, there were 15 flights (30 movements) a week. That would be 780 flights for the year.

Total movements for the airport for Q1-21 ran to a bit over 2,000. That's nearly 155 movements a week.