Cathay Pacific will add Melbourne to its growing Airbus A350 network when it brings its newest aircraft type Downunder from February 1.

The use of the A350-900 , outfitted with enhanced cabin product as well as wireless internet access, is part of a push by Cathay to increase capacity to Australia’s second biggest city by 15.7 per cent.

The airline has been flying the new aircraft in South-East Asia and recently began services to London’s Gatwick Airport and Dusseldorf, in Germany. Other destinations already announced include Auckland, Vancouver, Paris and Rome.

 The new plane will operate one of Cathay’s three daily flights to Melbourne and will be joined on March 1 by the airline’s popular Boeing 777-300ER on a second daily flight. The bigger B777, which will operate as the daily CX178 flight, boosts the availability of premium seating with 40 seats in business and 32 in premium economy.

The aircraft replace Airbus A330s and bring the number of weekly seats into and out of Melbourne to 12,194.

The A350 will be deployed on the daily CX104 flight, which currently departs Melbourne at 1420 and arrives into Hong Kong at 2150, and the return flight CX105. 

New features on the aircraft include new premium economy seats, high resolution touch video screens, better economy seats and well-designed enhancements to business class. Like its composite competitor, the Boeing 787, the A350 has higher cabin pressure and greater humidity to make passengers feel fresher after long flights.

Read our A350 review

Cathay Pacific general manager Southwest pacific Nelson Chin said Cathay had grown its Melbourne operation to 21 flights a week over the 40 years it had been operating to the city.

 “It is really exciting to be introducing the Airbus A350 into Melbourne,’’ Chin said in a statement. “I know people are going to love the quieter, more comfortable inflight experience with larger windows, new seats and a spacious aesthetically-pleasing cabin with LED mood lighting. The introduction of the Boeing 777-300ER onto CX178, which departs daily at 2330, not only adds more business, premium economy and economy class seats, but it also provides better payload which will help facilitate cargo uplift.’’

Cathay currently operates 74 passenger flights a week between Hong Kong and Australia, with over 23 years of continuous services to all six major Australian cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, Adelaide, and Perth.
 

Australia’s Jetstar has become the latest low-cost carrier to target budget conscious business travellers and expects strong demand from small to medium enterprises.

The Qantas offshoot has launched a new Flexibiz option that allows business travellers from Australia, Singapore or New Zealand to change their flights, gives them an extra carry-on allowance and allows them an to select an upfront seat without paying the usual charge. They can also get a credit voucher for a cancelled booking that is valid for six months.

The bundle can be added to Jetstar’s starter fares for up to $34 on domestic flights, $39 on short haul international flights and $55 on international flights.

The move follows a road paved by other low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet and comes as Virgin Australia has changed its fare structure.

Ryanair introduced “business plus’’ fares two years ago which allowed passengers to make changes to their flights, albeit at cost,  and offered a 20kg luggage allowance and fast-track security clearance.  EasyJet  introduced a more flexible fare in 2010 which included unlimited changes, free hold luggage, free seat selection, fast track security and priority boarding.

Jetstar Group chief executive officer Jayne Hrdlicka said the airline was responding to feedback from small to medium size businesses who want to save money but want more flexibility and some value-added extras.

Hrdlicka said the airline was seeing a growing number of business travellers happy to fly with a low-cost carrier but needing the flexibility to change flights when a business meeting ended earlier or later than expected.

She said Jetstar was expecting strong demand from small and medium size businesses.

“While the majority of customers travel with us for leisure purposes, on particular routes during peak times we see a significant number of customers travelling for business,’’ she said. “Qantas is well-established in the premium corporate travel market, and we want to complement this by ensuring that the other end of the business market is well-catered for. This is part of our dual-brand strategy, where each airline focuses on specific market segments.

“Our aim is to further grow our market share of the price-sensitive business market.’’

The new flexible fares are available for businesses who have registered at Jetstar’s Business Hub website using an Australian Business Number or the New Zealand or Singaporean equivalent.
 

Cathay Pacific will add Melbourne to its growing Airbus A350 network when it brings its newest aircraft type Downunder from February 1.

The use of the A350-900, outfitted with enhanced cabin product as well as wireless internet access, is part of a push by Cathay to increase capacity to Australia’s second biggest city by 15.7 per cent.

The airline has been flying the new aircraft in South-East Asia and recently began services to London’s Gatwick Airport and Dusseldorf, in Germany. Other destinations already announced include Auckland, Vancouver, Paris and Rome.

 The new plane will operate one of Cathay’s three daily flights to Melbourne and will be joined on March 1 by the airline’s popular Boeing 777-300ER on a second daily flight. The bigger B777, which will operate as the daily CX178 flight, boosts the availability of premium seating with 40 seats in business and 32 in premium economy.

The two aircraft replace smaller Airbus A330s and bring the number of weekly seats into and out of Melbourne to 12,914.

The A350 will be deployed on the daily CX104 flight, which currently departs Melbourne at 1420 and arrives into Hong Kong at 2150, as well as return  CX105 flight. 

New features on the aircraft include new premium economy seats, high resolution touch video screens, better economy seats and well-designed enhancements to business class.

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Like its composite competitor, the Boeing 787, the A350 has higher cabin pressure and greater humidity to make passengers feel fresher after long flights.

Cathay Pacific general manager Southwest Pacific Nelson Chin said Cathay had grown its Melbourne operation to 21 flights a week over the 40 years it had been operating to the city.

 “It is really exciting to be introducing the Airbus A350 into Melbourne,’’ Chin said in a statement. “I know people are going to love the quieter, more comfortable inflight experience with larger windows, new seats and a spacious aesthetically-pleasing cabin with LED mood lighting. The introduction of the Boeing 777-300ER onto CX178, which departs daily at 2330, not only adds more business, premium economy and economy class seats, but it also provides better payload which will help facilitate cargo uplift.’’

Cathay currently operates 74 passenger flights a week between Hong Kong and Australia, with over 23 years of continuous services to all six major Australian cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Cairns, Adelaide, and Perth.
 

An AirAsia X captain inadvertently entered the wrong longitude into an Airbus A330’s navigation  system, causing the plane to fly in the wrong direction and cross the departure  path of an adjacent parallel runway at Sydney Airport. 

The captain, with more than 22,000 hours experience, omitted a zero when manually entering data prior to take-off using a technique not recommended by the manufacturer.

This resulted in a positional error of more than 11,000kms and the aircraft was not fitted with an upgraded flight management system that would have compensated for the mistake.

An Australian Transport Safety Bureau report into the incident found the crew failed to pick up the error until airborne and their subsequent attempts to fix it caused further problems.

The March 10, 2015 flight to Kuala Lumpur was departing on Sydney’s runway 16R when air traffic control saw it enter the departure flight path of runway 16L.  

The report said the crew were likely distracted by an enhanced ground proximity warning system alert that prevented them from noticing the turn towards the parallel runway until alerted by air traffic control.

The flight crew were having trouble with their instruments and identified a problem with the navigation system. However, their attempts to troubleshoot the issue caused further degradation of the system as well as flight guidance and control systems.

At one point, the captain’s primary display lost all information except airspeed and vertical speed while the first officer’s display showed incorrect heading information and there was no usable map, waypoint of tracking information.

The autopilot and autothrust systems were also unavailable and some of the aircraft’s handling characteristics were affected by a change in the A330s flight law.

An attempt to return to Sydney was thwarted because bad weather had set in and the degraded systems meant the aircraft could only land in visual conditions. It was instead radar vectored by air traffic control to Melbourne where the crew performed a go-around on their first approach before landing safely. 

The plane spent just under three hours on the ground being checked before departing for Kuala Lumpur with the original crew. 

The ATSB found that despite a number of opportunities to identify and correct the error, it was not noticed until after the aircraft became airborne and started tracking in the wrong direction. 

“The ATSB also found that the aircraft was not fitted with an upgraded flight management system that would have prevented the data entry error via either automated initialisation or automatic correction of manual error,’’ the report  said.

“The flight crew attempted to troubleshoot and rectify the situation while under heavy workload.  Combined with limited guidance from the available checklists, this resulted in further errors by the flight crew in the diagnosis and actioning of flight deck switches.’’

There was kudos, however, for air traffic controllers whose “effective monitoring and assistance’’ reduced the risk to the AirAsia aircraft and other planes in the area.

AirAsia X has since issued a training bulletin and package for its flight crews that emphasised the correct operation and alignment of the air data and inertial reference system

It also shared the results of an internal investigation with all pilots and is reviewing the recovery procedures to be undertaken.

Investigators said that even experienced flight crew were not immune to data errors and noted that carrying out procedures and incorporating equipment upgrades recommended by aircraft manufacturers would assist in preventing or detecting such errors.

It also illustrated the importance of effective communication when dealing with an abnormal situation under high workload conditions.

To its credit AirAsia X has quickly reacted to the incident. In a statement it detailed its actions. 

With reference to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) report published today regarding an incident involving an AirAsia X Airbus A330 aircraft with registration number 9M-XXM bound for Kuala Lumpur from Sydney on 10 March 2015, AirAsia X would like to confirm that we have taken the following corrective actions immediately following the incident, and prior to the publication of today's ATSB report:

• All AirAsia X aircraft have been equipped with upgraded flight management systems since the incident

• Development of a training bulletin and package for flight crew that emphasises correct operation and alignment of air data and inertial reference system

• Briefing all pilots on our internal investigation findings and reviewing recovery procedures to be undertaken

AirAsia X would like to stress that we have in place robust management systems to monitor and prevent similar incidents from reoccurring.

We also wish to reiterate that we have regularly passed safety and security audits conducted by various international regulators, including the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA). We remain committed to ensuring our compliance to all safety and security regulations.

The safety of all guests and crew are our utmost priority at all times.
 

Travellers Down Under are celebrating the end of punitive surcharges on airline tickets after Australia recently became only the second jurisdiction in the world to ban profiteering on credit and debit card fees.

But it remains to be seen how airlines and others will react in the long term after the government closed off a lucrative source of so-called ancillary revenue that had been earning them as much as $A68 on an airline booking for a family of four.

And the unintended consequences will be closely monitored after the first credit/debit card surcharge ban in the European Union, introduced in December 2015, prompted airlines to introduce new fees to circumvent the government action.

From September 1, the four major airlines in Australia have dropped the flat surcharges on ticket purchases of $A7 per booking for Qantas and Virgin Australia and $A8.50 per sector on Qantas low-cost subsidiary Jetstar and Virgin Australia low-cost subsidiary Tigerair.

However, in response to "indicative" guidelines published in May by the Reserve Bank of Australia on the cost of transactions that companies such as airlines are now banned from exceeding — 0.5% for debit cards and 1-1.5% for most credit cards, but 2-3% for American Express —  the airlines have adopted widely varying standards that they're passing on to their customers.

On Jetstar, for example, the surcharge for a ticket purchase via debit card – previously a flat $A8.50 per sector or $17 per round trip – is now just 0.48 per cent of the purchase price – 48 cents on a $A100 ticket. Its competitor Tigerair's fees are nearly double that at 0.88 per cent for debit card purchases.

The downside is that many travellers, particularly business class travellers on international journeys could pay substantially more now under the percentage fee system than previously under a set fee, although Qantas now caps the surcharge at $A70 for both debit and credit cards.

What's not known, however, are the consequences for credit card perks after European consumers reported that some of theirs had disappeared. Euro airlines are also applying surcharges that are many multiples of the EU-specified costs of 0.2 per cent for debit cards and 0.3 per cent for credit cards.

Airlines in the United Kingdom, for example, have been applying surcharges of 1.5 to 3.0 per cent, as well as set amounts of up to £13 ($US17) on top. It's not yet clear what effect Britain's decision to leave the EU will have on UK government policy.

The chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, has anticipated the potential for unforeseen consequences.

"That's been a fair bit thought about," he told AirlineRatings.com. "Obviously this change is a government initiative but we did engage with government trying to think through negative consequences.

"The main one was that most people don't charge a surcharge and this could encourage them to do something they weren't doing before, but they could have done anything before and they chose to do nothing.

"It's not clear to me that being able to charge 1.5 per cent  is going to encourage them to do that we they could have done even more before. I don't think we're going to run into those sorts of problems."

Sims says compliance by airlines with the new regime has been excellent and he doesn't expect problems.

"What happens when you get a law that's targeted at a particular behaviour, the main companies like the airlines and the event organisers really know the game is up and we have engaged with them extensively and they've made the necessary changes," he says.

"They have, I think, realised the game is up and they've been very co-operative and the changes seem to be the ones that should be made.

Sims says, however, the ACCC will be watching closely.

"We'll see over time," he says. "I think this thing will be fairly self-policing. That is, you've got the companies that were seriously in the gun who have made the changes and other who probably aren't as visible, if they start charging these sort of things (high fees),  I think there'll be enough people aware of the fact that's wrong and will get contact.

"All it takes is a couple of contacts to us and we know there's a problem and we can get onto it.  It should be straightforward to follow up those who are trying to do the wrong thing."

America and Asia, meanwhile, are still relatively free of credit card charging restriction.

The US Congress about five years ago agreed to cap so-called "swipe fees" on debit cards. However, lobbying by banks left the cap at around 25 US cents – twice as high as initially recommended by the Federal Reserve and an estimated five times banks’ cost of processing debit transactions.

Congress has not yet addressed credit card fees.