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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0798.PDF
806 FLIGHT, 10 June I960 First air-to-air photograph of one of Olympic Airways' Comet 4Bs, 13 of which are to be operated by the BEA- Olympic consortium. Olym- pic have so far received two out of four on order AIR COMMERCE ANSETT'S TAKEOVER BIDS CO far R. M. Ansett has failed in his two most recent bids to^ take-over local operators in -New South Wales and New Guinea. In NSW, the board of East-West Airlines rejected anoffer of no fewer than eight Ansett Transport Industries 5s shares for each £1 share. (ATI is the holding company for the variousAnsett companies, of which Ansett-ANA is one. ATI 5s shares are quoted at roughly 8s.) In the past two years Air Ansett has taken over three intra-State operators—Butler Air Transport (NSW), which he has renamed Airlines of NSW; Queensland Air Lines; and GuineaAirways (now Airlines of South Australia). He objects to East- West because he says its operations bite into those of his NSWcompany. East-West is a small operator of four DC-3s but is flourishingunder the present management. It has a Friendship under charter from TAA. Some 90,000 passengers a year are lifted on routesinside NSW, covering towns such as Tamworth, Glen Innes, Warwick. Should Mr Ansett secure control of East-West, he willthen own all the regular scheduled airline operators except TAA and Mac.Robertson-Miller Airlines. The Department of Civil Aviation is known to be antagonisticto the Ansett attempts to secure control of the whole non-TAA system, for it is DCA policy that each State should if possiblehave one independent intra-State operator. By the terms of the enabling Act, TAA is forbidden to operate intra-State services. It is now apparent that Mr Ansett desires to control all thenon-TAA operators, which gives him intra-State rights, while TAA is forbidden to enter this field. There is no question ofAnsett-ANA taking over Mac.Robertson-Miller as yet. Such a move would create a political uproar. The West Australian peopleare sensitive to moves by the East to take them over, and in any event DCA would do everything possible to stop this move. The New Guinea take-over bid is another matter. Under theterms of the Government agreement by which Qantas leaves New Guinea in July, TAA takes over all Qantas services in the areaand both Ansett-ANA and TAA are allowed to operate from Sydney to Moresby. This means that while TAA can carry passengers from Sydneythrough Moresby to Lae and Rabaul without change of aircraft or airline (as the case may be) Ansett-ANA's passengers mustget off at Moresby. If they want to go farther they must get into another operator's aircraft. This will obviously be to TAA'sadvantage on the Sydney - Moresby route. The Government has made it plain that it would have noobjection to a take-over by Ansett-ANA of either or both of the internal private-enterprise operators who have been competingwith Qantas. Mandated Airlines (a subsidiary of the wealthy Islands trading firm of W. R. Carpenter) has 8 DC-3s and liftsabout 23,000 passengers and 1,500 tons of freight a year. The other operator, Papuan Air Transport, lifts about 11,000 pas-sengers a year with a Piaggio P. 166 and a DC3, and smaller aircraft. Seeing for himself at Avro on May 27 was (centre) the Minister of Aviation, Mr Duncan Sandys, here inspecting the fuselage of the almost complete Avro 748. With him (right) is Roy Ewans, Avro director and chief designer of the newest product of the Hawker Siddeley Group Mr Ansett has been negotiating with Mandated directors forsome weeks, but the New Guinea firm has set a price of £500,000. The deal breaks down over the New Guinea demands for themaximum number of Ansett Transport Industry shares. Man- dated shares are worth four times as much as ATI. Under thedeal Mandated (Carpenter's) would secure up to 2,000,000 shares in ATI, the biggest single block of shares in that firm. Mr Ansettcould not countenance this. Mandated are very conscious of their strong position in bargain-ing. They have plenty of capital to buy one or more Friendships to compete with TAA's Friendship on the internal New Guineaservices and they make a substantial annual profit. Unless Mr Ansett can get into New Guinea local services, however, hisSydney - Moresby services are bound to suffer in comparison to those of TAA. For this reason, Ansett-ANA executives are seriously consider-ing running an Electra on the route, instead of the planned DC-6B. This would seriously affect Ansett-ANA for neither they norTAA can get enough hours with their DC-6Bs (two each) to make them pay in Australia. If Ansett-ANA runs an Electra,TAA will operate either an Electra or a "Super Viscount."
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