Chart of the week #12: Manchester to Australia?

This week’s “chart of the week” was provoked by a social media post presenting data that Manchester was the 2nd largest unserved market from Perth in the last year. The interpretation of that data and the conclusions drawn in that debate aren’t the subject of this post - although they are themselves very interesting - but it provoked a look down memory lane at direct flights between Manchester and Australia.

For most legacy carriers, long haul flights to/from the UK have become increasingly concentrated on London. The exception being the global mega connectors like Emirates and Qatar who can connect secondary cities in the UK into their Dubai and Doha hubs. This requires enormous scale on both sides of the hub, but allows Emirates to provide direct flights to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle, Qatar to Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester in addition to London.

By comparison, the only Asian connecting carriers that have managed to sustain service to a secondary UK city are Cathay Pacific and Singapore who serve Manchester. Both carriers have struggled to sustain this service, juggling several route configurations in recent years.

When last did Qantas and BA serve Manchester on directly from Australia?

Going as far back as 1980 we couldn’t find any direct Manchester-Australia flights on British Airways, but that search was nostalgic in its own right, seeing how BA’s Australian flights have evolved to the current daily London-Singapore-Sydney flight. The era of multi-stop flights saw BA providing direct service to Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth in addition to Melbourne and Sydney.

Meanwhile, Qantas served Manchester as recently as 1995 when it ended its 3x weekly service that ran as an extension of its flights to London, and prior to that as a 2x weekly extension of its Amsterdam flights. The cancellation of the Manchester leg wasn’t in vain as this coincided with a significant expansion of Qantas’s London operation, initially increasing London to 2x daily flights, one each to Melbourne (via Singapore) and Sydney (via Bangkok).

1983

QF2 MEL-SYD-SIN-BAH-LHR
QF10 MEL-SYD-BKK-AMS 2x weekly

QF1 LHR-BAH-SIN-SYD-MEL
QF9 MAN-AMS-BKK-SYD 2x weekly


1989

QF2 MEL-SYD-BKK-LHR
QF9 MAN-LHR-BAH-SIN-SYD-MEL 3x weekly

QF1 LHR-BKK-SYD-MEL
QF10 MEL-SYD-SIN-BAH-LHR-MAN 3x weekly


1996

QF2 SYD-BKK-LHR
QF10 MEL-SIN-LHR

QF1 LHR-BKK-SYD
QF9 LHR-SIN-MEL


Source: Historic published Qantas timetables.

In 2002, Qantas acquired two additional daily slot pairs at London Heathrow, allowing them to increase to 4x daily frequency with both Melbourne (via Hong Kong and Singapore) and Sydney (via Bangkok and Singapore) increasing to 2x daily. However, increasing competition from stopover carriers and the slowdown in international travel in the wake of the global financing crisis in 2009 led to a steady decline in the performance of Qantas’s London routes.

In 2012, Qantas halved their London flights to 2x daily with one each from Melbourne and Sydney, leasing the slots to BA where they remain to this day. In 2013, Qantas entered into a joint venture with Emirates, rerouting their flights via Dubai, changing the entire architecture of their European strategy, not just flights to the UK.

2007

QF1 SYD-BKK-LHR
QF9 MEL-SIN-LHR
QF29 MEL-HKG-LHR
QF31 SYD-SIN-LHR

QF2 LHR-BKK-SYD
QF10 LHR-SIN-MEL
QF30 LHR-HKG-MEL
QF32 LHR-SIN-SYD


2013

QF1 SYD-DXB-LHR
QF9 MEL-DXB-LHR

QF2 LHR-DXB-SYD
QF10 LHR-DXB-MEL


2024

QF1 SYD-SIN-LHR
QF9 PER-LHR

QF2 LHR-SIN-SYD
QF10 LHR-PER


Source: Historic published Qantas timetables.

In 2018, this evolved further with the start of the first non-stop flights to the UK when QF9/10 from Melbourne was shifted to fly non-stop from Perth to/from London. This has since evolved further with the Melbourne-Perth leg being dropped this year. At the same time Sydney to London shifted to Singapore, turning Singapore into Qantas’s dedicated scissor hub.

While the Singapore scissor hub is now an established feature of Qantas’s London network this is not as ubiquitous and many assume with one-stop flights to London utilising several stopover points. The consolidation around Singapore is actually a relatively recent phenomenon.

These evolutions are somewhat evident when examining passenger arrivals from the UK in Australia. So back to our question at hand, how popular was Manchester?

Passenger numbers from Manchester to Australia

Using BITRE data, we’re able to estimate the number of arrivals on direct flights in Australia from Manchester as far back as 1985! In 1985 there were 15,798 arrivals from Manchester, accounting for 4.7% of the total arrivals on direct flights from the UK. This peaked at 30,222 in 1992, accounting for 6.3% of total arrivals from the UK.

Total arrivals from the UK continued a slow and steady increase after 1992 while arrivals from Manchester plateaud, accounting for 5.6% in 1994. Data for 1995 is unreliable as Manchester flights ended during this year.

After the cancellation of the tag-on to Manchester arrivals from the UK continued to increase alongside the increase in flights described previously. Arrivals on direct flights peaked in 2007, after which passenger numbers declined rapidly reaching a plateau in 2014.

These data should not be interpreted to mean that travel between Australia and the UK has declined since 2017. In fact, the opposite is true as a greater share of passengers are traveling via transit hubs.

We highlighted the importance of transit hubs in last week’s chart of the week that showed the incredibly high proportion of transit passengers flying between Australia and major transit hubs like the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

The UK is one of the most significant markets for transit carriers. Next week’s chart of the week will examine this a little further and estimate the volume and proportion of traffic carried on direct and transit flights between Australia and the UK. The results won’t be surprising but there is some nuance! But until next week, let’s test our intuition with a poll:

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