Couldn't agree with you more, KoruFlyer - Qantas New Zealand were an excellent airline. While not always as slick as AirNZ, they were always exceptionally friendly and the service was great. And was it just me or was the legroom on their whisper jets quite exceptional too (as an expat Kiwi who has been living in the UK for the last 5 years and therefore got used to cramped conditions, my judgement may have become warped...)? While Air NZ also offer one of the best domestic airline products I've experienced anywhere, a lot of the credit for that can be attributed to Ansett NZ/Qantas NZ - remember the bad old pre-competition days when inflight service consisted of a boiled sweet being thrown at you?

Bearing that in mind, I'm glad to hear that Qantas Airways is showing signs of starting a NZ domestic service but my experience on Qantas Australian domestic flights is that while they are a thoroughly decent airline we probably won't be able to expect the level of service we enjoyed on the late, lamented QNZ...

I'll never forget a recent flight on QNZ from Auckland to Wellington last December. It was a perfect summer day and I had just got off a long flight from London and was luxuriating in the spacious seats and genuinely friendly service after 24 hours being processed in the impersonal Singapore Airlines machine... The flight attendants announced that they were running a poetry competition based around the rhyming names of the Captain and First Officer - somehow I won it and got to sit in the cockpit for the approach and landing into Wellington, surely one of the world's more spectacularly situated airports. It was a great welcome home!