Qantas is a storied airline brand. It is the world’s third oldest airline. That unusual brand name comes from abbreviating “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services“. The airline is famous for its long-haul air service, since Australia is pretty much as far away as it can be from its traditional colonial market of the UK. The early long-haul flights used flying boats.
We don’t want to go back and review the fleet from the start in 1920! We start our review from 2000. As the chart shows the airline’s fleet grew and then started to shrink again. The spike in the parked fleet was the 767s. Some of these ended up as being converted to freighters by Bedek in Israel for Amazon’s Prime and one even ended up becoming the Google corporate aircraft.
While Qantas has seen its fleet evolve in size, it is interesting to see how few of the fleet are leased. This looks like an “old school” approach to fleet planning. Many other airlines are much more aggressive in using leasing. The advantage of leasing, of course, is that the airline has much more flexibility. For example, at Singapore Airlines their first ten A380s are now approaching ten years old and going to be returned to the lessors. This moves the original, overweight A380s, back to the lessor and allows the airline to either refresh with state of the art A380s or go with something else.
