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Aviation History
1964
1964 - 1283.PDF
718 FLIGHT International, 30 April (944 AIR COMMERCE Australia's Answers . . . to be greater than that of the 707, Qantas still believe they will be subsidizing BOAC for two or three years to come. Apparently with strong encouragement from official quarters, Qantas booked an order for four Concords early in April. This was not a firm commitment but, as was emphasized in Australia, was the reserving of places on the Concord line. To Qantas's astonish- ment a BAC press release issued in London appeared to go out of its way to emphasize that, unlike the airline's contemporaneous "order" for US SSTs, the Concord order was a firm commitment by Qantas. "After all the troubles of the last 15 years, including quite a deal of bitterness," said one Qantas executive with some asperity, "we were astounded." So, apparently, were some people in BAC, who wrote to apologize for this unhappy start to renewed relations between Qantas and the British aircraft industry. To make matters worse, Qantas officials read in the press of the recent design-range changes. They felt that they should have been told about them by the manufacturers. "You will never find an American manufacturer making a customer feel it is a privilege to buy his aircraft," said a Qantas executive. There are always two sides to every story, and it is hard to believe that BAC would have been so careless of a customer's feelings. But Qantas feel as I have described. Australia's State v private enterprise airlines Looking out of the window of an Ansett-ANA Electra as it taxyed out at Mel- bourne to operate the 4 p.m. Sydney service I saw, taxying out just ahead of us, a TAA Electra. Sure enough, as we landed at Sydney there was the same TAA Electra. On some flights Ansett arrive first, on others TAA. Somewhere in Australia or New Guinea at pretty well any time an Ansett Electra, Viscount, F.27 or DC-3 is trying to tan the hide off a TAA Electra, Viscount, F.27 or DC-S- and vice versa. Every member of the staff of each airline is on his or her toes to give a better service than the other. Flying the other way in a TAA Electra a day of so later I noticed that the pilot did not assume that his customers had seen Sydney Harbour Bridge before—as pre- sumably they all had, millions of times. He told us it was "looking very fine tonight," and one of the four dazzling white-costumed hosties switched out the cabin hghts so that the passengers could see out better. Everyone looked. On the Ansett flight (306, April 8) we hit some nasty bumps, the hardest in my experience—four or five g I should guess. A hostess who hit her head very hard indeed on a hatrack grinned heroically as, with studied unconcern, she walked up and down checking seat belts. Just before we landed the captain apologized for the incident. I had never heard this done before. I would not like to say which airline had the better operation. All I know is that bad manners and crummy service cannot exist where there is competition. You can tell a lot about a country by its air transport services. I asked Mr Ansett what he thought about Australia's two-airline system. Conditioned to expect all private-airline chiefs to grumble about how terrible Government policy is, I was surprised to hear him reply: "We have a Government which has a policy. You can- not have a system without a policy, and in this country it is 'We are not going to have a monopoly.' This is Government policy. We fight for every passenger, but we have to do it within certain rules. I don't see how you could get a better system within the require- ment of economic stability than ours. You couldn't possibly have a more competitive situation. Government policy is the first thing." In the newspapers while I was in Australia I saw that Ansett- ANA made a profit of over £Alm in the year ending June 1963, and that in his report Mr Ansett said: "The civil aviation legislation . . . which maintains the two-airline system until 1977 provides the framework for operations and economic load factors, and thus industry stability for both the government airline and ourselves. The satisfactory results of both operators are proof of the work- ability of the system and the complete justification for the nature of the legislation. In addition, the public have substantially gained from the competition." This competition is not carried to such extremes that the two airlines do not help each other at the technical level. Said Mr Ansett: "We always help each other out on technical matters. For instance, if they want a spare wheel somewhere they get it, and for a long time we helped them out with our test house for Rolls-Royce engines. They help us too, and if there is unserviceability we try to get our passengers on to TAA, and vice versa. It's better to satisfy the customer." I asked Mr Ansett whether he would be prepared to pool services with TAA, or was this against Australian law? "No," he said, "it isn't against the law, but we are not prepared to pool. Pooling up- sets the competitive situation and we won't have a bar of it. Our system of two-airline competition would go into disrepute if we went in for pooling." The "certain strict rules" to which Mr Ansett referred are speci- fied in the Airlines Agreements Act 1952-1961, which in effect pres- cribes that each airline shall operate comparable capacity with comparable equipment. The Department of Civil Aviation, of which the Director-General is a permanent official responsible to the Minister, fixes the capacity and ensures that equipment pur- chases are in accord with the Act. Within these strict 50/50 rules each airline goes all out to beat the prescribed overall load factor (68 per cent) and to get more than half the traffic. If one gets, say, 52 per cent of the traffic, this means it gets £A1.6m more revenue than the other, and this is in fact the order of profit. The margins are small and if one side relaxes it makes a loss. It's as simple as that. Of all the disputes which have gone to the DG for arbitration, the most controversial have centred on equipment. Any airline tends to be touchy about being told by civil servants what sort of aircraft to buy, yet it is equipment which is at the heart of sound regulation. So far as I know there is no precedent for a law which gives civil servants the right to say yea or nay to an airline's choice "Flight International" photograph View from high up on the fin docking in a Qantas 707 overhaul hangar at Sydney Kingsford Smith airport, with a Ti.?- Electra (left) by the terminal buildings
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