freemark

Mwenenzi

The economic's of a large aircraft on very short flights is not good. Better to use the asset on longer flights (over its lifetime)

General opinion is that the Wellington City Council is paying big $$$ to SQ to have that international flight.

QF used to run a B747SP WLG SYD many many years ago

nzkarit

Wide bodies are often designed with lower cycle counts. The narrow bodies usually are designed for more cycles.

The wide bodies would take too long board and deplane compared to flight time.

Most domestic gates in NZ are designed for narrow bodies. WLG has some swing gates which are widebody capable on North pier but AirNZ does have a domestic longue in North pier.

Wide bodies have a lot of mass to carry fuel. Mass requires fuel to carry around for no benefit. Which is why on medium haul the A330 can beat the 787s for fuel economy as lower empty mass.

Also if switched to wide-bodies would drop the convenience hourly flights and maybe push out to two or three between flights which would be awful. It's one of the benefits of the ATR72s WLG CHC as they can keep the frequency hourly.

AirNZ will over next few years boost capacity with the domestic A321s.

brenrox

Sbiddle will provide more insight, but I believe SQ received a large subsidy from WLG council to provide the initial WLG-CBR service...they reneged on this and changed it to WLG-MEL whilst still claiming the subsidy.

Edit - just realised you meant AKL-WLG? not sure AKL-WLG and AKL-MEL are comparable. NZ's AKL-WLG service is very frequent (every 30 or 60 min?) so assume they justify the reduced capacity per flight this way? I don't imagine they have too many spare wide body planes at the moment either?

sbiddle

SQ receive a subsidy for every passenger from the council but the actual deal is so top secret it can't be disclosed even under OIA requests which are all heavily redacted.

Domestic A321neo will be here in a few years for WLG-AKL and AKL-CHC services. Nothing unusual about peak time flights being chokka, that's just the norm and why they have half hour departures during morning and evening peak times.

A domestic 777 would be a nightmare - huge increase in running costs, crew costs, significantly increased turnaround times and ultimately reduced frequency.

freemark

Thai-Kiwi

Agreed on the poor economics of wide bodies on solely domestic runs 45-120 minutes.

At least for the NZ situation. Other airlines can, and do, use wide bodies for short sectors but presumably this is a part of a wider strategy around servicing leisure travellers arriving off long-haul.

For example, THAI runs 747/359/77W types 4-6x daily Bangkok-Phuket (1:20) and Chiang Mai (1:10). They also run A320 2-3x daily (Thai Smile Air).

They provide a business class service (hot meal), and a cold meal in economy. Business class costs around $250 and economy $50 for advance fares (one way). My assumption is that many of flights are to move masses of tourists who arrive from long-haul flights to BKK, and connect to domestic leisure destinations.

THAI also runs at a loss and is supported by the Government, but there are other factors besides wide-body economics at play...

nzkarit

Japan due to shear number uses wide bodies domestically. They had special 747-400 with no winglets. As with the short flights they didn't curise long enough to get a benefit of improved fuel burn of the winglets to counter act the additional mass they had to carry to altitude.

When slots become an issue and airport can handle longer dwell times at gates, wide bodies start to get used as have to move the people. This isn't an issue in NZ yet. Would add more domestic gates and up the frequency to every 15-20 at peak.

kiwifrequentflyer

In saying all of this, I still always hoped that I would get to fly on one of Air NZs wide bodies that they were flying between CHC and AKL (still might be?) never got so lucky.

Nathan Catton

They are flying AKL-CHC and CHC-AKL December to February to position for the CHC-SIN-CHC flights.

kiwifrequentflyer

Oooh. Is there any particular time that they'll be flying this? I will be flying that route over that time and I am pretty flexible!

libertyuk

MEL-SYD is one of the busiest routes anywhere, and even Qantas almost entirely operates 737s on it. Even in the US, the trend has been to 737s/A320 family by the big three (remaining) legacy carriers, a far cry from the 1970s when 747s, DC-10s and L1011s were commonplace.

henrus

Not as exciting as it seems... sure you can score a PE or J seat for an extra $30 but that's about it. Food and drinks are still the same as on other flights and IFE doesn't come with headphones.

Most recent I can think of was a 787 that operated an extra AKL-CHC-AKL on 26 July the day CHC had the bad fog. I was actually flying from AKL-CHC that day and got moved to an A320Neo which was slightly better than the normal A320 but from memory those on the 787 flight were told boarding would start around 60 minutes prior to departure.

I also flew MEL-WLG last month on the SQ flight, I was in business with only 10 other people and Economy seemed about half full. The SQ crew doesn't even get off in Wellington and it almost seemed pointless with the crew saying they'd seen even less passengers before on the flight.

ajeleonard

For shorthaul flights, in the absence of airport capacity constraints, it's generally better to increase frequency than use larger aircraft

Rebound

They were running widebodies twice a day to CHC not that long ago too,