Ansett Australia

» see ansett.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Reg Ansett ran a road passenger service between Hamilton and Melbourne in country Victoria until the state's transport regulator licensed him off the route. His answer was to buy an aircraft, which nobody was regulating yet, and Ansett Airways began flying that run on 17 February 1936 with a single Fokker Universal. It became the oldest airline in Australia and the second largest, and for four decades it barely had to compete for the position.

From 1952 the federal government ran a Two Airline Policy that split the domestic market between the state carrier and Ansett and kept everybody else out, matching capacity and fares between them by agreement. Ansett bought Australian National Airways in 1957 and became the private half of a legislated duopoly. Reg Ansett died in 1981, and the company passed to Peter Abeles and Rupert Murdoch, who held half each through TNT and News Corporation.

Deregulation arrived in 1990 and Ansett turned out to be built for the old arrangement. Air New Zealand bought TNT's half on 1 October 1996 for A$325 million and the remaining half on 23 June 2000 for A$580 million in cash, which left one airline in a small market owning another airline in a bigger one. Virgin Blue started selling cheap seats two months later. By 2001 Ansett was flying an aging and badly mixed fleet, and the regulator grounded its 767s twice over missed maintenance checks, the second time at the start of the Easter holidays.

On 12 September 2001 Air New Zealand stopped funding it and put the airline into voluntary administration. Two days later the administrators found no money to keep flying and grounded 133 aircraft, and about 16,000 people were out of work by the end of the week. The September 11 attacks were a day old, which is the worst possible week in history to be an airline looking for emergency finance.

~ the record ~

~ the second airline ~

What flew after 14 September was not really the same company. The administrators, Mark Korda and Mark Mentha, restarted a skeleton operation on 29 September using only the Airbus A320 fleet, rehired about three thousand staff and called it Ansett Mark II. The point was to keep the business breathing long enough to sell it, because an airline with no schedule is worth scrap value.

Creditors approved a buyer in January 2002. The Tesna consortium, Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew, would pay NZ$330 million in cash and take on up to NZ$300 million of employee entitlements. Thirty Airbuses came with it. Staff were told to expect a relaunch in March, and terminal leases and aircraft were being moved across.

~ 27 february ~

Tesna pulled out on 27 February, less than a day after Sydney Airport agreed to transfer the domestic terminal lease to it, citing legal advice that the transaction could not be completed. Lew blamed non-delivery of airports and aircraft by third parties. The federal government spent the following day rejecting any responsibility for the outcome.

With no buyer, the administrators had nothing left to preserve. Ansett Mark II stopped flying at midnight on 4 March 2002, and the last service, AN152 from Perth to Sydney on an A320 registered VH-HYI, touched down at 06:42 on 5 March. The three thousand people who had been rehired in September were made redundant a second time.

~ who paid for it ~

Employee entitlements came out of a levy of ten dollars on every domestic airline ticket sold in Australia, which ran for about eighteen months and meant the public covered what the collapse could not. Qantas absorbed most of the abandoned market share and rehired roughly six hundred former Ansett staff. Virgin Blue got the runway it needed and grew into the second carrier the country had just lost.

The brand did not vanish entirely. Ansett's Melbourne simulator center was bought out of the wreckage in 2001 and still trades as Ansett Aviation Training, running full flight simulators for airlines across three continents. Pilots who were never old enough to fly for the airline get their type ratings in a building with its name on it.

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