Ian Douglas

Those flights are coming back a little bit.

They're not back to the full schedule they were flying before, but the Gulf carriers are again flying into their hub airports in Doha and Dubai and Abu Dhabi and connecting passengers through.

I've been tracking some of them not just out of Australia but out of Asia as well, and some of the pricing has been quite aggressive to get customers back again.

I think it's reasonable to book on them.

In fact, my partner has booked a flight to Europe by the golf carriers.

So this household has already said, yes, we think it's reliable enough to go ahead.

They don't have an option.

They had to find a solution.

They're major businesses.

There is a massive investment in aircraft, massive investment in relationships as well.

So it wasn't an option.

It was find the solution, get the aircraft back in the air, get people moving to where they need to be and rebuild the reputations and start now.

Yeah.

Nobody will operate a commercial passenger aircraft unsafely.

It's just the nature of the industry is that you are way safer on a plane than in a taxi going to the airport.

Yeah, particularly it's gone up even more in Asia than it has in other parts of the world.

So the price of jet fuel has more than doubled in some places.

The problem with that, well, several problems with that.

One is that fuel makes up such a major part of the total cost of operating an aircraft.

And when you double the fuel cost, that cost comes immediately.