QG

According to this article, QF earns over $800mil per annum on this route alone.

Impressive!

mapleg

The article is complete nonsense when it is entitled World's Most Profitable Flights.

Profit and revenue are not the same, as any schoolboy knows.

Globaliser

And I still wonder to what extent even the revenue figures are reliable - the BA board is also discussing this: Highest revenue airline routes in the world

Mwenenzi

The methodology of the revenue is in doubt
I dought any airline will publish revenue or make it available. More so where the MEL-SYD flight is part of a longer trip (MEL-SYD-XXX)

AA's LAX-JFK route one of the world's most profitable

number_6

Actually they do and OAG has access to these metrics. It is allowed to be revealed in aggregate and not as individual results, but airlines are also required by some governments to file these (used for decisions on route allocations and air treaty capacity). QF has basically doubled SYD-MEL revenue since the fare war with Virgin ended : Similarly for BA thanks to its JV arrangements. But the OAG metrics exclude freight revenue, which dramatically affects profitability of some routes. CX for example makes a lot on freight, so does QF for trans-pacific. It wouldn't surprise me if the highest total profit route was HKG-LHR on CX. Of course profit is also affected by capital depreciation and tax rates, making it a meaningless metric for airline efficiency.

nzkarit

KInda makes sense. MEL-SYD is one of the worlds busiest air routes so they can tune the flights just so. E.g. if they remove a flight, there is enough empty seats an hour either side to take the people. If they upguage there is also enough people flying the return to keep yield high.

That said it is the main trunks like these with high yields that support the regional routes etc. Which are needed to keep pax who take two or more flight journeys on their network and not another airline.