A team of 12 senior Singapore Airlines (SIA) executives was in Melbourne last week to review the Asian carrier's options for involvement with bankrupt Ansett Australia.
SIA is considering whether it should take up a management contract, act as a consultant in an Ansett rebirth, or make a fully fledged bid for the assets necessary to re-establish Ansett as a major carrier.
The company's officials had brief talks with the Ansett pilot group, which presented proposals to the voluntary administrators on 12 October. But sources believe another week will pass before SIA shows its hand.
The submission from the former pilot consortium AN Staff proposed a full-service, premium airline with Star Alliance credentials which, from the outset, would use about 40 existing Boeing 737s, 767s and Airbus A320s. It would be a two-class carrier operating on a route structure and frequency rationalised to profitable and strategically necessary routes.
SIA is believed to be looking at a different fleet plan to the pilots, preferring rationalisation to a single manufacturer, with the Airbus A319, A320 and A321 favoured because of fleet commonality and the possibility of A330s being introduced if international operations are recommenced.
AN Staff says there has been no progress with SIA: "Our goals are the same; we showed them the basic outline of our plan and they were very polite, but there was no indication at all that we'll be working together. That doesn't affect our bid in the slightest, because we've structured it so we're independent of any other bid. I'm sure they could throw more resources at this than we can, but they'd certainly be starting from a long way further back. Our plan is to acquire the existing air operator certificate [AOC], but it would take an absolute minimum of three months to get a new AOC.
"The difficulties we have with anyone else's plan are that we think it's essential to jump back in and recover our market share," says AN Staff.
SIA is treading cautiously because of the so-called "Pauline Hanson Factor", a reference to an Australian politician locally promoting anti-Asian sentiments, and a fear that SIA, a 25% stakeholder in Air New Zealand, will be blamed for events leading to the failure of Ansett and the parlous condition of its former parent.
A separate bid being developed by two Australian businessmen, Solomon Lew and Lindsay Fox, will propose a smaller airline mirroring Virgin Blue. This would disqualify it from global alliances and place it in a market already under threat from new Qantas initiatives.
Meanwhile, Qantas has re-introduced significant discounting in response to the creation of restart Ansett Mk II with fares on competitive routes more than halved.
Source: Flight International
