Virgin Australia resumed flights to Bali last week for the first time since 2020. Sydney-Denpasar was the first route to relaunch on 15 June, while the routes from Brisbane and Melbourne to Bali restarted on 17 June.

These flights have been full, but it hasn’t quite been smooth sailing for Virgin. So far, every single one of these flights has had to stop in Darwin to refuel.

Passengers on Virgin’s flights to Bali over the past week were advised at short notice of the change, which has also resulted in the flights’ departure times being pushed forward by an hour so they’ll still arrive in Bali at the originally scheduled time. So, why do the flights need to stop in Darwin?

The reason for the Darwin “splash and dash”

Virgin Australia operates Boeing 737-800s on its flights from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne to Bali. While this aircraft normally has enough range to make the roughly six-hour flight, there are some operational issues at present.

Flights don’t just need to have enough fuel on board to reach their destination airport. They also need enough fuel to divert to an alternate airport in case there are unexpected problems at the intended destination, such as inclement weather or runway closures. Unfortunately, many of the usual alternate airports near Bali such as Lombok and Surabaya are either temporarily closed for maintenance, not currently open to international visitors or can’t be used during the late evening hours when Virgin’s flights are scheduled to arrive in Indonesia.

Because of this, Virgin has determined that the nearest suitable alternate airport if they can’t land in Denpasar is Darwin. This is further away, so the airline would need to carry more fuel on board.

Unfortunately, a fully loaded Boeing 737-800 can’t carry enough fuel to fly to Bali and then back to Darwin. Therefore, Virgin needed to make a decision to either offload passengers and bags, or add an en-route refuelling stop. Currently, most of Virgin’s flights to Bali are completely sold out so the airline made a commercial decision to add a stop.

“This is due to maintenance works and changes to operating hours at airports within the region during the pandemic, we are currently required to carry more fuel than we ordinarily would (to get to alternate airports if required),” a Virgin Australia spokesperson told news.com.au last week in a statement.

“We had a choice to reduce the number of passengers we would carry on our flights to conserve fuel, or to make a stopover in Darwin to re-fuel and have everyone who had booked arrive in Bali on schedule. To make sure everyone gets to Bali, we chose to re-fuel.”

Qantas also flies Boeing 737-800s on its Sydney-Denpasar and Melbourne-Denpasar routes. Qantas flights have not been stopping to refuel in Darwin, but it appears Qantas has been restricting the number of passengers and bags carried on board instead. The Qantas flights are not going out full. (Qantas also has the luxury of being able to move passengers onto Jetstar flights if it needs to offload people as it owns that low-cost carrier.)

How this works in practice

AFF member SeaWolf flew from Sydney to Bali with Virgin Australia last week and says the refuelling stop in Darwin was fairly straightforward. The stop in Darwin lasts around 30 minutes, and in total it adds around an hour to the overall journey time. No passengers leave or board the plane in Darwin.

For those that are curious about how this works in practice, I was on VA63 last Friday. It’s pretty simple, the plane lands at Darwin and taxis to a remote stand. Everyone is asked to unbuckle their seatbelts but remain seated. The ground crew hooks up the fuel pumps and loads up the tanks. Stairs are pushed up to the door and a ground crew member then boards with the paperwork for the pilots. Ground crew leaves and you buckle up again and get another safety demonstration. The aircraft then taxis back to the runway and takes off again.
Total time on the ground was about 30 mins and it all seemed pretty smooth. It’s not ideal but also not that big of a deal really. If you’d happened to be asleep at the time you could have slept through the whole process and not even noticed.
– SeaWolf, 22 June 2022

All return flights from Bali back to Australia are operating as non-stop services. As well as being slightly shorter (due to the prevailing winds), they aren’t subject to the same operational constraints.

When will Virgin resume non-stop flights to Bali?

Virgin has been progressively updating its schedules, changing its schedules from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to Denpasar from non-stop to one-stop services.

As recently as Thursday 23 June, Virgin’s website was showing that flights would resume as non-stop services from Saturday 25 June. But it appears that Virgin just hadn’t updated its schedule or informed passengers of any changes yet, as it later updated its schedule for flights beyond 25 June which are now also appearing as one-stop flights via Darwin.

Australian Frequent Flyer requested comment from Virgin Australia.

Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Virgin flights to Bali require technical stop in Darwin

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include aviation, economics & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.