Air Transport

Qantas Airways has called on Australian regulators to improve the country's air traffic management system.

"Clear direction from the regulator would revitalise the project to migrate the entire national fleet to satellite navigation," Qantas CEO Alan Joyce says in a speech delivered last night to law-makers at Parliament House in the nation's capital Canberra.

He says this initiative "would end the current anomalous system whereby airlines are required to pay for redundant ground-based navigation systems".

"Allied to this, we should accelerate the deployment of automatic dependent surveillance broadcast (ADS-B) across all Australian airspace," he says.

In an effort to help carriers' conserve fuel, regulators "should also bring forward the time-line to take required navigation performance (RNP) nationwide."

"Part of this would include replacing the old-school instrument landing system with the safety and precision of modern GPS landing systems," he adds.

Joyce says there is no reason Australia cannot implement these changes quickly.

"We don't have the complexities of multiple regimes to deal with," he adds.

Joyce also highlighted that even though Qantas has cut services and reduced capacity to cope with the downturn, "our long-term outlook is bullish."

"We are still planning to buy 160 aircraft over 10 years and we have an investment pipeline of more than A$7 billion ($6.2 billion) over the coming three years alone."

He adds, that Qantas' low-cost carrier Jetstar plans to launch more non-stop services to Asia and "expand even further afield to Europe over the coming years."