Hi,

I'm an air nz airpoints customer but am now doing more trips to australia and am not sure whether to go with virgin or qantas primarily. I've been flying more virgin due to the alliance with air nz however I have not enjoyed my experiences in WA with Skywest.

Yesterday our little Fokker 50 was speeding down the runway then powered down to abort take off and I was thinking "should I brace???" Turns out one of the engines didn't power up enough for take off so they aborted takeoff. (Turns out my only go round has also been with Skywest!). Funnily enough I was reading the top 10 airline safety rankings in the newspaper on take off and virgin was not listed. Qantas was though!

In the terminal another lady said they taxied out to the Tarmac and returned as a wing wasn't working properly. She said they really needed to change the planes as they were old. I was wondering if I should even get on the plane at all or just drive!!

I realised its a bit difficult evaluating who to become a member of because with virgin I guess I didn't expect to get Skywest planes. I've liked the actual virgin planes. I've had better experiences on qantas or link. Virgin in perth is closer to terminal 1 however I feel myself leaning towards qantas as they have a better safety record but I saw in some other thread that ... They pair with alliance also? So you're still left flying these other unknown carriers which makes it difficult to evaluate. I earn all of 3 airpoint dollars by taking virgin flights so that's not a major swayer. I'm leaning towards qantas now purely because safety comes first i think but was wondering if you guys from velocity could shed some light on why you've chosen Virgin over qantas??

I fly both east and west but mainly west oz lately. I know I prefer flying into brisbane than perth in terms of turbulence!