Originally Posted by
dddc
I'm wondering why BA still serves SYD. Years ago they flew into multiple destinations and now it's just the one. There used to a morning and evening arrival as well. Didn't they drop Melbourne shortly after the Australian CEO left? Seem to recall some on here joking (or perhaps not!) that it was kept on so he could visit his mother!
MEL was dropped about a year after Eddington left (in '06, Willie Walsh came around in '05).
In all honesty, SYD works and works well because, in no small part, of the SIN stopover. That's something QF also found out when they moved to DXB. SIN has a lot of demand, especially since the slow death of HKG, and that stopover taps into that reservoir.
The main reason, in my opinion, why BA isn't investing in a 'project Sunrise' is that I don't think the return on invested capital would be higher with a nonstop route and, besides that, there wouldn't be enough need for a subfleet besides a SYD nonstopper.
From an return on investment point of view, flying nonstop has a sense only if, as an airline, you can manage to convince enough punters to pay a premium that covers the opportunity cost of not picking up extra passengers and cargo on the SIN-SYD-SIN leg, and I'm not entirely sure the market is there for that. Or that it's big enough to get two carriers on it. And I also don't think it'd be all that cheaper to operate vs the SIN stopover, because - unlike on QF, where they managed to extort some pretty harsh time rules to their crews - I don't think that BA TUs would settle for less than a 6-day tour for such a mammoth journey. And rightly so.
From a fleet point of view, the Sunrise 35K must have some payload restriction too in addition to an extra fuel tank. That'd make it less efficient on non-ultra long haul routes and, to be absolutely honest, BA doesn't have a need to do that. Sure, you could say that this ultra longhaul 35K could do other Aussie cities, or New Zealand, or whatever but... Air NZ shut down its flights to LHR (maybe they'll come back, they made some noises), and routes outside of SYD are a bit thin. Besides, there's also overflying concerns. The GCMap route for a LHR-SYD direct flight goes over a big chunk of Russia.. avoiding it is a detour.
Frankly, there's a great deal of destinations that would, in my opinion, deserve BA to serve them in the LATAM, Indian and SE Asia regions before a nonstop to SYD. And BA ought to start investing in them soon, considering the shenanigans going on in America for the foreseeable. BA's hitched its cart to America for way too long...