REX, Executive Director, Chris Hine at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2022
Chris is an Executive Director of Rex and the Executive Chairman of the Australian Airline Pilot Academy (Wagga Wagga, New South Wales and Ballarat, Victoria). He has over 25 years of aviation experience and has been with the Rex since its inception in August 2002. Chris was the Rex Chief Operating Officer, General Manager Flight Operations and Chief Pilot, and prior to Rex worked for Kendell Airlines holding various Check and Training Captain positions. He has also lectured in Cockpit Systems Management for the Bachelor of Applied Science (Civil Aviation) degree at the University of South Australia.
Transcript
Chris:The service disruptions, I think, have affected the travelling public. It's been really disappointing that in a time when we're seeing ever-increasing demand, strong demand for services, that the industry in the media at the moment is all about a particular airline and its chaos, effectively, and its disruption to its passengers, countless lost bags. So that hasn't affected us because we've been able to deliver that product to our customers consistently. We are still going to be, I think, in August, the most reliable airline. And so for us, it's just disappointing that the industry is talking about that rather than capturing the demand that is out there. And taking the greatest benefit of the recovery availability. We just took delivery last Friday of our 7th Boeing 737 aircraft, and that aircraft has gone into the existing network, which gives us the ability to add some services to within that, those current city pairs. And we're actively looking for aircraft 8 and 9, and now we're sort of still a bit open on where we see those aircraft going. I think a proportion of those 2 aircraft will probably still go into our existing network where we see increased opportunity to, to put some more capacity into those markets, but we're certainly actively exploring a number of other opportunities. So the jury's still a bit out on that, but we see a great opportunity for us to further take that product offering that we have to the travelling public in more destinations. We don't really have an optimum fleet size because I think one of the One of the sort of particular aspects about Rex is that we don't have a growth-for-growth's-sake policy. We don't seek to be a certain size company. We never have. We've just gone into markets where they make sense, and sometimes we've exited markets where they no longer make sense. So we don't have a grand plan in size. We don't have particular targets that others tend to like to talk about. We're simply a business that takes opportunity. If it makes financial sense and we can take our product and offer it to more people, then we'll do it.
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