They were direct pre-covid
They used to use A330s and my guess is at the expense of A330 domestic services once again. Expect less A330s between SYD/MEL and PER with more domestic configured A330s used on flights around Asia.
That map has been constantly updated since April 2021 when they resumed international flying between AU and NZ then further revisions in Nov 2021 when international flying resumed. The subject to borders has been there ever since and I suspect no one has bothered to remove it.
This map has existed since late 2021 and has progressively been updated as QF resumed flights to exisiting destinations as well as new ones in the 3 years since, and "subject to borders" refers to Australia's dystopian COVID-19 border controls under the former Morrison Government, and it's probably that nobody has been bothered to remove that footnote.
They could have done that instead of the existing wet lease arrangements though but choose the out sourcing option instead for some reason. I can't imagine it would be different for this route.
Yep, but that's a good thing because QF didn't fly to DEL, BLR, CDG, FCO, ICN, DIL, TBU as well as YVR year-round pre-pandemic - I'd say that this is a massive net gain of QF destinations since 2019, and no wonder it's putting pressure on the fleet. I agree that QF [redacted] fleet planning in the 2010s, but I think a strained fleet with more destinations is better than a more flexible and available fleet with a limited amount of destinations.
Crew shortages are why the Finnair A330s are wet leased for the first 2.5 years and then dry leased after, this buys them time to get A330 trained crew.
I suspect it's more Finnair doesn't want to downsize their own crew and forcing QF to wet lease means QF pays AY to keep more of their staff around.
Assuming the 380s are actually back. Who knows when the 4 at AUH will be back. There's barely enough to run QF11 (SYD -LAX) today. They still have to add JNB to the a380 network.
And yet the annual allocation of training slots is virtually non existent. My take is that they're continuing to farm out everything they can, including the flying. Rather like Boeing, in that flying is no longer any part of the core business (whatever that actually is).
Frequent Flyer?
Seems to have worked pretty well for them domestically. Looking at the BITRE stats, Qantas only operates around 40% of QF coded domestic flights, the rest being outsourced to the various Qantaslink airlines.
