In my crystal ball gazing at the beginning of the year, I wrote, One wonders if the arrival of Embraer Regional Jets on the Tasman may make Air New Zealand think of regional jets themselves for regional and domestic services. As ATR services are increasingly full there is an increase in frequency with airports not so easily able to cater for this frequency.
Visiting Auckland over the last few days was Embraer E195-E2 PR-ZIQ on a quick demonstration visit. It did a demonstration flight this morning before departing for Darwin this afternoon as photographed below.
Time will tell if we see some of these flying our skies... perhaps replace E2 with a koru...
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| Embraer E195-E2 PR-ZIQ departing Auckland on 4 March 2024 |
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| And ironically, two Air New Zealand ATR 72s, ZK-MVB and ZK-MVK, had to hold for gates |
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It does seem a very logical choice for Air NZ to pick up a small fleet of these Embraer's or even Airbus A220s, to serve a number of domestic routes, alongside several possible 'thin' trans-Tasman routes.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, the success & subsequent upgrade of the BNE-WLG route back to a 737 shows Qantas their experiment could work again, and with their increasing dominance in seat numbers on trans-Tasman routes I suspect they will try this move again soon. Air NZ could be left well behind.
For domestic routes, these would not even need to replace the ATRs for some ports entirely, but just to complement their services on the busier flights, i.e. first flight out Monday morning. And with the rumored change coming to all NZ ports requiring security checks soon anyway, then this factor would become a moot-point for most customers & the airports themselves too.
Possible domestic routes that would better suit a 90–130-seater option:
> PMR-AKL
> NPE-AKL
> IVC-AKL
> HLZ-CHC
> ZQN-CHC
And there could be several possible trans-Tasman routes that would be better serviced or become viable too, such as:
> DUN-BNE
> DUN-SYD
> AKL-HOB
> AKL-CBR
> CHC-ADL
Interesting proposition and not one that Air NZ have really spoken much about, mainly just focus on Qantas's arrival to date. Maybe theyre too worried about trying to find a 'green' domestic option rather than keeping an eye on their competition & customer bases......