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The story
Origins
QantasLink's constituent airlines were assembled in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the government-owned domestic carrier Australian Airlines (formerly Trans Australia Airlines), which was competing with Ansett for regional feeder traffic ahead of the deregulation of domestic aviation. In 1988 it bought a 36 per cent stake in Eastern Australia Airlines, later increased to 42 per cent; it formed Australian Regional Airlines from the remnants of Air Queensland; and it made commercial agreements with other regional operators, including Sunstate Airlines, which it bought in 1990. A jet operation, Australian Airlink, was set up in 1990 in the aftermath of the 1989 Australian pilots' dispute. From 1991 its British Aerospace 146 aircraft, pilots, flight attendants and maintenance were supplied under contract by the Adelaide-based National Jet Systems (NJS), whose lower salaries and overheads made the arrangement cheaper than operating the routes directly.
Qantas bought Australian Airlines for A$400 million in September 1992. In April 1993 the Qantas board decided to retire the Australian Airlines name, and the fleets of the regional subsidiaries – Australian Airlink, Eastern Australia, Southern Australia, Sunstate and Australian Regional – were to adopt a modified version of the Qantas livery. Airlink, which flew as Qantas Airlink, expanded through the mid-1990s. In June 1994 Qantas announced that NJS would replace Airlink's four BAe 146-100s with three larger 146-200s and two 146-300s, increasing its capacity by 38 per cent, and in November that year Airlink began intrastate flights in Western Australia, challenging Ansett's long-standing dominance there. In October 1994 the federal opposition told Parliament there were safety concerns about Airlink's maintenance. Qantas said its safety investigators had found no matters of substance in issues raised by Civil Aviation Authority officers, and that Airlink was subject to the same safety audits as its other services, although it confirmed that bird-strike damage to one aircraft at Alice Springs had been repaired by an unqualified person. Airlink's pilots, who were employed by NJS, were not covered by the award that applied to Qantas and Ansett pilots and were paid less than Ansett's BAe 146 pilots. By 1996 Qantas operated intrastate services only through wholly owned subsidiaries, including Airlink, Eastern Australia, Southern Australia and Sunstate, and by 2000 Airlink was flying twice daily between Darwin and Dili in East Timor.
Formation (2001–2004)
Qantas' regional airlines began flying under the single QantasLink brand in May 2001. That month the ACCC approved an arrangement under which the low-cost carrier Impulse Airlines, which was heading for insolvency, stopped competing on trunk routes and flew for Qantas under a wet-lease contract. Qantas' chief executive, Geoff Dixon, said that Eastern Australia, Southern Australia, Sunstate and the NJS-operated Airlink would be brought together under the QantasLink banner, each remaining a separate profit centre. Qantas acquired Impulse on 21 November 2001, and its eight Boeing 717s and thirteen smaller aircraft were folded into QantasLink, the 717s being redeployed in QantasLink colours.
The collapse of Ansett and its regional subsidiaries in September 2001, weeks after the failure of the Queensland carrier Flightwest, left many regional centres without air services. QantasLink and other regional airlines operated hundreds of additional flights, and according to Qantas, QantasLink carried more than 4,000 stranded passengers free or at heavily discounted fares and added nine ports previously served by Flightwest and Ansett to its permanent network. In January 2002 it added five Dash 8-300s and, three months later, six more leased 717s, which it used to open non-stop routes such as Sydney–Rockhampton, Sydney–Mackay and Adelaide–Gold Coast; Qantas said the jet expansion would create 150 jobs, including 80 pilots and flight attendants based in Hobart. By mid-2002 QantasLink operated more than 2,700 flights a week to 55 destinations and employed about 1,600 people.
A 2002 cost review proposed merging QantasLink's five divisions – Eastern, Southern, Airlink, Sunstate and AirConnex – into separate jet and turboprop operations and reducing their five air operator's certificates to two, with job losses expected mainly in administration. Over the following year the managements of the Impulse and Airlink jet operations were combined, Southern Australia Airlines was absorbed into Eastern Australia Airlines and Airlink, and the Beechcraft 1900 and Shorts 360 fleets were withdrawn, leaving the Dash 8 as QantasLink's only turboprop. QantasLink also won a five-year Queensland Government contract to operate regulated routes to Weipa, Horn Island, Longreach, Barcaldine, Blackall, Roma and Charleville. In May 2004 the 14 Boeing 717s then flying under the QantasLink brand were transferred to Qantas' new low-cost airline, Jetstar, leaving QantasLink with Dash 8s and BAe 146s.
Expansion and fleet renewal (2004–2012)
In January 2005 QantasLink ordered seven Bombardier Q400s for $200 million; when the first arrived in January 2006, Qantas said QantasLink had become the first airline in the Southern Hemisphere to operate the type. From July 2005 its BAe 146s were progressively replaced by 717s released by Jetstar, which National Jet Systems operated and maintained for QantasLink under an agreement signed in June 2005. A network review in mid-2006, prompted by rising fuel prices and falling patronage, ended QantasLink services to Kangaroo Island and Port Lincoln in June and to Burnie in July, leaving those routes to Regional Express (Rex), which said it would add flights if demand justified it; at the same time twice-daily QantasLink Dash 8 flights replaced Qantas' daily Boeing 737 service between Melbourne and Launceston. Qantas then described QantasLink as Australia's largest regional carrier, operating more than 1,800 flights a week to 48 destinations.
In October 2007 Qantas announced an order for twelve more Q400s for QantasLink, with options on a further 24, which would allow it to retire its 36-seat Dash 8-100s; in July 2010, with 21 already bought, it ordered seven more. A nationwide shortage of pilots, whom larger airlines were recruiting from regional carriers, forced QantasLink to suspend some New South Wales and Queensland services in early 2008, and in June that year, citing record fuel prices, it announced that it would leave the Melbourne–Wollongong route, permanently end its suspended Newcastle services, retire its six remaining Dash 8-100s early and close its Mildura maintenance base, with the loss of 20 jobs.
In December 2010 Qantas bought Network Aviation, a Perth-based charter airline that flew fly-in fly-out workers to Western Australian mine sites, for about $30 million. Network, then the state's third-largest fly-in fly-out airline, operated two Fokker 100s and six 30-seat Embraer turboprops and kept its own management.
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2013–2019
In November 2013 QantasLink began flying Boeing 717s fitted with a business-class cabin on some of Qantas' Canberra routes, and from mid-April 2014 its 717s replaced Qantas' Boeing 737s on flights between Hobart and the mainland. The change was accompanied by the redundancy of Qantas' 35 ground-handling staff in Hobart, which the federal MP Andrew Wilkie described as "another alarming downgrade of Tasmania". Qantas said the changes were about having "the right aircraft on the right routes", added a daily return flight between Hobart and Melbourne and said QantasLink would recruit 15 pilots and 30 flight attendants to be based in Hobart. The redeployment made QantasLink the Qantas Group's fastest-growing division by capacity in July 2014. From December 2015 QantasLink 717s also flew between Sydney and the Sunshine Coast.
On 31 July 2015 Qantas announced that all of Network Aviation's services would be operated under the QantasLink brand and that its 14 Fokker 100s would be repainted in QantasLink colours, unveiling the first repainted aircraft; Network kept its own air operator's certificate.
2020–present
On 20 May 2020, Qantas announced the purchase of Cobham Australia's National Jet Systems subsidiary, which had operated the Boeing 717-200 on behalf of QantasLink for 15 years, bringing both employees and the fleet in-house. In August 2020 QantasLink announced that it would close its Boeing 717 bases in Perth and Cairns, moving eight of the aircraft from Perth to Brisbane and basing six in Melbourne.
On 4 February 2021, Qantas announced an initial three-year deal with Alliance Airlines to wet-lease three Embraer E190 aircraft, with the option of up to 14, to operate on routes such as Adelaide–Alice Springs, Darwin–Alice Springs and Darwin–Adelaide. Qantas progressively expanded the arrangement, and by February 2025 it had called up all 30 aircraft available under the agreement. In August 2026 the agreement was renegotiated – a move signalled in late 2025 because of unexpectedly high costs – to reduce the wet-leased fleet from 30 to 23 aircraft over the 2026–27 financial year, with higher prices paid by Qantas.
John Gissing, QantasLink's chief executive, retired in November 2023 and was succeeded by Rachel Yangoyan. In December 2025 Qantas placed QantasLink under the chief executive of its domestic airline, Markus Svensson, while keeping the airlines' separate air operator's certificates. Yangoyan became the group's chief technology, AI and transformation officer and was replaced at QantasLink by Jetstar's Mark Dal Pra, who reports to Svensson and does not sit on the group's leadership team.
In October 2025 QantasLink announced that it would close its pilot and cabin crew bases in Canberra, Hobart and Mildura in April 2026. About 70 staff were affected; they were offered support to commute from those cities or to relocate to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. The airline said that concentrating crews at its larger bases would help it respond to disruptions and reduce delays and cancellations, and that flights to the three cities would not be affected. The federal transport minister, Catherine King, called the decision disappointing, and it was criticised by unions and by local, state and federal politicians, although the chief executive of Mildura Airport said Qantas had "maintained open and transparent communication" with the airport. In February 2026 the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee found that the decision had been "poorly communicated and managed", described Qantas executives' evidence about when it had been made as "evasive and inconsistent", said it was unconvinced that the change would reduce cancellations and delays on regional flights, and warned that consolidating QantasLink's operations in the major cities risked "making QantasLink a regional airline in name only".
In November 2025 QantasLink began twice-weekly flights from Perth to Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands under a five-year passenger and freight agreement with the federal government, taking over the service from Virgin Australia. In 2026 island residents criticised its decision to cut the included baggage allowance from 30 to 23 kilograms and to raise the price of excess baggage, and the local federal MP asked it to reverse the changes; Qantas said they would help manage aircraft weight, reduce baggage offloads and make more seats available. In April 2026, citing higher fuel costs and falling demand, Qantas cut its Adelaide–Mount Gambier flights indefinitely and suspended four other routes.
From Wikipedia’s article on QantasLink, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3