Sydney Again

I had to go to Sydney for work Thursday and Friday, It’s just a 90 minute flight and I like Sydney so I was looking forward to it. I had a fantastic hotel looking on the Harbour Bridge and a good meal at a Thai restaurant with some colleagues. I was good meeting my mate Audrius from Lithuania again.

On Friday night, I got to the airport a bit early and I noticed the gigantic amount of announced flights, being a numbers man, I started calculating a bit and working with numbers

Okay, so here we go. From Sydney domestic airport there are about 30 planes an hour between 15:00 and 22:00 on a Friday evening and night. On average these planes will fly 150 people each. That makes about 30.000 people on a Friday night. On a 21 mio population that makes that 3 out of every 2000 Australians fly out of Sydney every Friday. Considering cities like Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra and especially Perth, Probably one in every 400 Australians takes a plane on a Friday evening/night. Let me repeat that: that is one in every 400 people (counting kids, old people, everyone) every Friday of every week! And I’m not counting international flights.
The day that flying becomes too expensive is the day that cities like Adelaide and Perth become islands. They are so remote; the only acceptable way to get there is by air.

But fair enough, my return flight from Brisbane to Sydney cost AUD 240, and with today’s currency exchange rate that is 130 Euro for a return flight. If I’m not mistaking that is exactly the airport ax alone at Schiphol. So it is still extremely cheap to fly around Australia.