When Virgin Australia takes delivery of its 737 MAX 10 aircraft starting in 2023, it will be as part of the airline’s future: charting a
#PaxEx path between its primary competitors, full-service Qantas and low-cost carrier Jetstar, both owned by the Qantas Group.
The MAX 10s, says chief executive officer and managing director (and former Jetstar boss) Jayne Hrdlicka, are aimed at “high-density domestic and short-haul international routes or where there are constraints due to slot availability limitations”.
In Australia, that’s likely to mean the Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane triangle where the recliner seats Virgin offers on its existing 737 fleet are just fine for the one to two hour hop plus transcontinental flights to Perth, previously operated by the airline’s fleet of Airbus A330-200s on busy routes, where recliners aren’t quite up to business class snuff.