For cabin crew the above applies, for the pilots it’s a curtained off business class seat.
Interesting statistics Melburnian1, thanks for the post. Management are somewhat transparent to us about the actual numbers on flights
AviatorInsight, thanks - with a total of seven seats unavailable for revenue passengers, total capacity seat wise for the A332 on the HKG route is effectively 268 not the 275 that Seat Guru and other similar websites consistently show. This small reduction also applies to many other widebody aircraft if they don't have "secret" rest areas for onboard staff. So the load factors by percentage are a tiny bit better than the published BITRE percentages suggest.
As you can see, with international flights everything is published regarding passenger loadings - although for a month, not individual flight loadings. No doubt some flights would have been full or very close to it even in October with the percentages above for overall seat utilisation, and others not so well patronised. The lag from the end of the month to publication is normally at least two months: some airlines would be much slower to provide data and may have to be asked more than once, although airports would be a subsidiary source.
Since you or anyone else can ask check in staff how many are on a flight, or look up electronic or other documents, and passengers can if they wish walk through the cabins and count, or even do that at the boarding gate, I'm a tad mystified why you'd say 'management is somewhat transparent.'
Am I correct to assume that you mean that "they" tell you say a week after the end of a month how the loadings, overall, are going? That might also be when they submit the figures to BITRE.
It's good information - I wish that the same was published for surface transport by route in each state on a regular basis.
The December and January figures should be better, but November probably relatively low, but as mentioned it's the yield per seat and in total that the managements care about, as would we if we were running a private enterprise passenger transport organisation.
All other things such as economic performance being equal (a brave assumption), VA's change to a daily frequency on the MEL - HKG - MEL route (with the different departure and arrival times not varying greatly by day) can only help to boost passenger numbers over time provided the airline and its shareholders persist with a route like this despite the inevitable significant startup losses (and the rising cost of aviation turbine fuel that must be the subject of many management discussions, not just at VA).
The other important factor is that irrespective of mode or route, prospective passengers (and booking means such as in airlines' case travel agents) can take months to "know" that a carrier is now an option on a route. If one asked in Collins or Pitt Sts 'which airlines fly nonstop from Australia to Hong Kong?', CX and QF would be likely to be frequently named, but VA rarely and HX almost never (unless in the latter case one came across some Hong Kongers to ask). This is largely a function of the two last mentioned being recent entrants.
