Air Chathams to use bigger plane for Whanganui to Auckland route

Air Chathams' 64-seat ATR aircraft at Whanganui Airport. Photo / Bevan Conley

All going to plan, Air Chathams will be using a bigger plane on it’s Whanganui to Auckland route from April.

Chief operating officer Duane Emeny said the year had started well for the airline and demand for domestic flights was still high post-Covid 19 - although this was interrupted by the Auckland floods last year.

“Weather’s a real tough one for airlines because obviously it’s no-one’s fault. You can’t do much about it but it really does impact your bottom line.

“A lot of people can’t travel and then you’re forced to do things like put flights into credits or refund. so there’s a lot of cost involved that you can never really recoup,” he said.

Towards the end of last year, about 20 per cent fewer people were flying across all of their North Island domestic routes, Emeny said.

“We’re seeing that all across our domestic routes in the North Island, so that’s Whanganui, Whakatāne and also the Kāpiti Coast.”

Emeny said Air Chathams and businesses in general needed to be careful where they invested and consolidated due to economic conditions.

“We purchase a lot of parts for our aircraft fleet from overseas and that’s all paid for in the US dollar.

“The New Zealand dollar hasn’t been strong against the US over the last 12 months so we anticipate that won’t change too dramatically going forward.”

However, the Whanganui-Auckland service would continue for the foreseeable future as the company had “a lot of confidence” in the route.

“It is the strongest of the three North Island regional domestic routes we operate,” Emeny said.

“It’s definitely well supported locally so we really appreciate that.”

Air Chathams is planning to bring in its 68-seat ATR72-500 aircraft to run the route between Friday and Monday from April.

A 34-seat Saab plane is currently used.

“We get a lot of that combined business and leisure peak travel,” Emeny said.

“People want to travel up to Auckland for the weekend or internationally and connect through and you also get quite a lot more business travel as well on the Friday afternoon and Monday morning.”

He said the holiday period was traditionally a quiet time for airlines and Air Chathams had reduced the number of flights to and from Whanganui by around 30 per cent from late December.

“When business stops we change our schedule to fly a little less often than we normally would during the rest of the year.”

Flights running out of Whanganui over the holidays had been relatively well patronised, with minimal weather interruptions except for Boxing Day, Emeny said.

“Boxing Day was quite bad, there was quite a bit of low cloud in Whanganui for parts of the day and that stopped our schedule from operating in the evening, but other than that, fingers crossed, it’s been quite good.”

The full schedule of flights for the service, including early morning flights out of the city, will be brought back in mid-January.

Finn Williams is a multimedia journalist for the Whanganui Chronicle. He joined the Chronicle in early 2022 and regularly covers stories about business, events and emergencies. He also enjoys writing opinion columns on whatever interests him.