New boss to pilot Freedom's advance

By CHRIS DANIELS

Cheap and cheerful is still paying off for Freedom Air, New Zealand's original low-cost airline.

The bright yellow airline is celebrating nine years of flying with a new boss and five new shiny planes, the first of which will arrive in May.

Stephen Jones, a former executive of Air NZ and Fletcher Challenge Energy, takes over in the cockpit from former acting MD Michael Young, who is moving to parent company Air NZ's head office.

Jones is joining the airline just as it is embarking on a major marketing campaign designed to emphasise how it differs from Air NZ.

There has been a growing feeling in the industry that Freedom Air may have been "unleashed" - given permission by Air NZ top brass to start really mixing it up and taking on new competitors across the board.

Jones thinks Freedom hasn't changed much, but the aviation sector has.

"There's been a lot more entrants to the market recently, particularly on the transtasman, which is Freedom's core operation."

The first of the new Airbus A320 aircraft will be on the Freedom schedule from June 1. The others will join the fleet at two-month intervals. Each A320 can carry 168 people, up from the 142-seat capacity of each of the current Boeing 737s.

Jones says it is not hard for Freedom to avoid "cannibalising" high-fare passengers from the Air NZ -branded planes and services.

"Freedom is about point-to-point, simple offering, whereas Air NZ offers a much broader set of products - it does have business class, it does allow connections to different points in the network."

Freedom has had several roles in its nine tumultuous years. It is widely remembered as the fighting brand deployed by Air NZ to destroy the fledgling Kiwi Air, which began offering low transtasman fares.

Jones said Freedom was originally set up to fly Australian domestic routes, but this was abandoned when the Australian Government pulled out of its "open skies" agreement three months before it was due to come into effect.

Freedom has also flown local domestic routes left under-served when Ansett New Zealand collapsed. But it is now back to its core business - the transtasman leisure market and now the Pacific Islands.

Air NZ has recognised that to keep costs low, Freedom needs a lot of autonomy.