Qantas plans daily flights south

By CHRIS DANIELS aviation writer

Qantas New Zealand is expanding its operations and plans to start daily flights between Auckland and Queenstown from the end of October.

A daily Auckland-Christchurch-Queenstown service also will begin on September 22.

Qantas spokesman Peter Collins said the airline's new flights would be a real boost for tourism, giving connections to other services to and from Australia and the United States.

The airline at present flies the Auckland-Christchurch-Queenstown route only during weekends. It also runs weekly ski-season services to Queenstown from Sydney and Brisbane.

Air New Zealand flies between Sydney and Queenstown once a week, but expands the service to up to three flights a week during the ski season. It also flies ski-season services from Brisbane to Queenstown.

It has direct flights between Auckland and Queenstown at least twice a day, and more during weekends.

* Air New Zealand's operating statistics show a steady growth in passengers carried last month.

Traffic across the whole Air NZ group, measured by revenue passenger/km, was up 4.4 per cent on June last year.

Traffic for the financial year to date was up 5.6 per cent when compared with the year to July 2002.

Capacity, measured by available seat/km, was up 6.6 per cent, but load factors were down 1.5 per cent for the month, with planes 69.3 per cent full.

Load factors were up for the financial year to date and planes 74.4 per cent full, up from 72.3 per cent for the same period last year.

Domestic operations have been performing much better than international, though this result has been affected by the introduction of the express-model on domestic flights.

Both parts of the business recorded increases in passengers carried and revenue passenger/km flown.

But international flight load factors for June fell 2.3 per cent to 69.5 per cent.