Why is Qatar Airways flying near empty jets around Australia?

Istanbul / Turkey - March 28, 2019: Qatar Airways Airbus A330-300 A7-AEE passenger plane arrival and landing at Istanbul Ataturk Airport

By Zach Havard

Qatar Airways has been exploiting Australian aviation laws by flying ‘ghost flights’ between Melbourne and Adelaide every day.

The Qatari-government-owned airline is allowed to fly 28 times a week into Australia’s four major airports (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth), although there is no limit under their current bilateral agreement on how many flights the carrier can undertake into non-major airports, like Adelaide.

At the end of last year, Qatar added a new daily service to Melbourne, however, registered Adelaide as its destination and departure port in Australia, effectively using a loophole to add an extra flight each day by not adding directly to its 28 flights a week limit.

Making matters more interesting is the fact that Qatar Airways can not sell any domestic tickets to customers wishing to fly from Melbourne to Adelaide (or vice versa), meaning the only passengers onboard are those who have a second leg on the international route.

Plenty of room to get comfortable. (iStock – narvikk)

Numbers onboard the second leg of the flight are so low that they’ve been considered a ‘ghost flight’ (a term applied to a flight operating at less than 10 per cent capacity) and average less than 10 people onboard each flight.

One industry source told The Guardian, “The whole purpose is to get people to Melbourne… I mean they weren’t even selling tickets (to Adelaide) for the first few weeks.”

“They were taking the piss out of the industry and the laws.”

The Department of Infrastructure and Transport placed a condition on the timetable for the route. A spokesperson for the minister, Catherine King said, “for these flights on this route [sic] that they must be available for sale for passengers and cargo arriving and departing from Adelaide”.

In July, the same office blocked an application from Qatar Airway for increased Australian capacity, it is thought the government took input from Qantas who had opposed the application.

Qatar was looking to add 21 flights per week into hubs such as Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth from the Middle East.

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