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Jetstar will redeploy its older Boeing 787 Dreamliner planes to service brand new overseas routes amid a refresh of the fleet that is scheduled to start this July, chief executive Gareth Evans says, as the Qantas-owned budget carrier marks its 18th year of operations this month.

Mr Evans also apologised to passengers caught up in the disruption to Easter travel as staffing shortages hit airlines and airports, as well as forecasting an easing in pent-up travel demand over the coming months with the domestic travel market to shift back to normal levels of growth and sector dynamics.

He said Jetstar would still grow its market share in this environment, even as the industry became more crowded and fuel costs rose. But he stopped short of saying if the combination of such factors would send any of Virgin Australia, Regional Express, or Bonza – due to start flights later this year – to the wall.

“History would suggest this is a two-carrier market, with Qantas and Jetstar being one,” Mr Evans, who has led the low-cost arm since late 2017, told The Australian Financial Review.

He said the sky-high fuel costs were a big challenge for a low-cost brand like Jetstar and would result in some price hikes, but would be managed mostly through capacity adjustments. Jetstar operated at 110 per cent of pre-virus capacity over Easter, though Qantas will start pulling back flying from June.

Flight Centre is the latest travel group to show losses are declining sharply as Australians take more trips, but the recovery is falling short of market hopes.

The travel company, whose brands include FCM and StudentUniverse, on Wednesday said its business division turned profitable in March, while its holidaymaker division was “close to break-even” that month.

The Brisbane-based group, said it would suffer a loss of $195 million - $225 million in its underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for the year ending June 30. That points to a loss of $11 million- $41 million for January-June, compared with a $184 million loss in the first half of the financial year.

The recovery was “well under way”, Flight Centre chief financial officer Adam Campbell told the Macquarie conference.

Still, RBC Capital Markets analyst Wei-Weng Chen said the full-year outlook was about 15 per cent below market expectations. He also highlighted that cash burn at Flight Centre had come “to an end”, with $2 million of cash generation recorded in March this year – although $4 million of that came from government subsidies.

The rate still compares favourably to almost $39 million bled in operating cash flow in December.

Shares in Flight Centre traded 6.1 per cent lower at $21.31 at 2.25pm AEST.

The guidance somewhat echoes Corporate Travel Management’s outlook a day earlier that showed a recovery but which also fell below some earnings expectations.

Flight Centre pointed to “ongoing industrywide growing pains during recovery”. This included tight labour markets, as The Australian Financial Review reported last week, and a lack of seats for international routes out of Australia.

Russia’s attack of Ukraine had not left any “noticeable impact” but Flight Centre was still monitoring the situation.

For the crucial leisure holidaymaker division, the company said total transaction value – measuring all the funds flowing through agencies, such as airline ticket purchases – was at 47 per cent of pre-COVID-19 levels in March. For business travel, it was at 76 per cent.

Corporate Travel’s shares were down 2.6 per cent at $24.30 in mid-afternoon trading.

The company had softened wording about second-half EBITDA. In February, Corporate Travel said it would be “stronger” than a normal season in which the earnings skew is typically 67 per cent in the second half. But the latest guidance was that the company was “still expecting” a two-thirds skew in the second half.

Citigroup analyst Samuel Seow said this implied $55 million in earnings, almost 30 per cent below market expectations. Even with boosts from buying Helloworld’s business division last year and benefits of any foreign currency lifts, he said the guidance was “still materially short of consensus”.

While Corporate Travel was finishing up the year with a solid rate of transaction volumes, some challenges were emerging including a larger mix of domestic travel, which had a lower revenue margin for the company, Mr Seow said.

UBS analyst Tim Plumbe said Corporate Travel continued to outperform competitors in transaction recovery levels and “we believe accretive acquisition opportunities remain, particularly in UK/Europe”.

Corporate Travel, which was previously targeted by short-sellers over its acquisition-led growth, has made two large acquisitions in distressed pandemic times: the $280 million Transport and Travel buyout and the $175 million acquisition of Helloworld’s business division.

Qantas boss Alan Joyce is confident of strong demand for non-stop flights from Australia’s east coast to New York, London and other far-flung destinations, after unveiling a multibillion-dollar order for a new fleet of ultra-long range aircraft.

The airline on Monday confirmed an order for a dozen Airbus A350-1000 jets to operate the world’s longest flights of around 20 hours, starting with flights from Sydney to London and to New York in late 2025.

Joyce said the specially configured long-range jets would “make any city just one flight away from Australia”, with services likely out of Melbourne and possibly other cities as more jets arrive.

“New types of aircraft make new things possible,” he said at an event at Sydney Airport. “That’s what makes today’s announcement so significant.”

The terms of the order are confidential. Airbus last listed the A350-1000 model in 2018 for $US366.5 million ($520 million) each, putting the deal at $6.2 billion on paper. However, list prices are typically discounted by about 50 per cent.

Qantas believes the new jets will more than pay for themselves because passengers will pay more to avoid stopovers in places like Dubai, Singapore and Los Angeles, saving three hours on a flight to New York and four hours to Europe.

It will also load up the jets with a higher mix of premium, business class and first class seats, which will make up 41 per cent of the cabin compared to 30 per cent in its existing Boeing 787s and Airbus A380s.

The airline has spent almost five years working on its so-called “Project Sunrise” and had originally hoped to launch the record-breaking flights in 2023 but the COVID-19 pandemic put the project on hold.

Qantas selected the A350 for the project in late 2019, and Monday’s announcement marks a firm order for the jets and sets out a timeline for their delivery, with all 12 of the A350s to be operating by 2028.

Monday’s mega order also includes the first 40 of up to 134 Airbus A321XLRs and A220s to start replacing its domestic fleet of ageing Boeing 737s and 717s from late 2023.

Qantas, like almost all airlines around the world, endured a gruelling two years as the COVID-19 pandemic grounded air travel, running up more than $2 billion in combined losses and laying off around 9000 people, or a third of its staff.

But domestic travel demand has roared back quicker than expected and put the group on course to return to profitability in the 2023 financial year, it revealed on Monday. Net debt had dropped from $5.5 billion to $4.5 billion since the end of December.

“That demand, that recovery of our balance sheet, gave us the confidence to be able to place this order today,” Mr Joyce said at an event at Sydney Airport.

“And this fleet order is unbelievably significant. Qantas for 100 years has changed this business with picking the right aircraft at the right time.”

Analysts at Barrenjoey Markets estimated the whole order with Airbus would cost Qantas $6 billion to $6.5 billion.

High oil prices would be a headwind for travellers in the short term, however, with Joyce flagging it would have to hike ticket prices by around 7 per cent in July and August and trim its domestic capacity - from around 115 per cent of pre-COVID levels to 110 per cent.

Qantas said it was on track to deliver underlying earnings before interest, depreciation and amortisation of $450 million to $550 million in the 2022 second half, but a “significant” full-year loss that included the worst of the Delta and Omicron waves.

The A350-1000 is designed to carry about 350 passengers but Qantas’s configuration will seat only 238 across four cabins: six in first class, 52 in business, 40 in premium economy, and 140 in economy. A “wellbeing zone” will be available for passengers to stretch during their marathon flights.

The A321XLRs will not only have more seats than the 737s they replace (200 versus 174) but can fly around 3000 kilometres further, with a range of 8700 kilometres. That means Qantas can also deploy them on shorter international routes to South East Asia and the Pacific as well as domestically.

Virgin Australia boss Jayne Hrdlicka is warning passengers that busy airports are here to stay as the travel sector exceeds its pre-pandemic activity and dusts off two years worth of cobwebs.

Her comments come after an Easter long weekend where travellers battled immense delays and lost baggage. Ms Hrdlicka told The Australian Financial Review these issues were regrettable, but maintained that her company held up better than competitors and would work to ensure they are not repeated.

“We did as good a job as we could do,” she said. “There’s a natural dynamic at play here, where the industry was dormant for a couple of years with some activity, but a not a lot of concentrated activity.

“We’ve now had that concentrated activity – it takes a little for the processes and people to get to the level of efficiency that would have been the case two years ago.”

Still, prospective travellers hoping check-in and security queues will ease in future are in for a shock. Ms Hrdlicka, who was in Sydney on Wednesday to relaunch Virgin’s invitation-only lounge clubs, predicted airlines and airports would remain busy, especially around holiday periods, from here on in.

The clean energy regulator must clean up its act and more closely scrutinise its flawed carbon credit program because doubts about the scheme reflect poorly on the broader market, Qantas boss Alan Joyce says.

Mr Joyce, who on Thursday announced new interim sustainability targets at the airline, said he would welcome further regulation to weed out dishonest operators accumulating credits that fail to limit the nation’s carbon burden.

“These bad examples give a bad name to [carbon credits]. More regulation of them would be welcomed because you want customers to have confidence that the carbon offsets they are purchasing and investing in are of the utmost high quality,” Mr Joyce said.

Qantas purchases carbon credits, also known as Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), from the Clean Energy Regulator for its carbon offsetting scheme, where travellers can pay extra to offset their emissions while flying.

But ACCUs have faced criticism over the last week after a whistleblower said up to 80 per cent of those issued by the regulator are flawed and called for the government to remove the watchdog’s remit over the credits.

Qantas sustainability head Andrew Parker defended the company’s use of the scheme, saying it did not buy ACCUs from projects the whistleblower alleged had a flawed assumption of deforestation, been issued credits for “trees that are already there”, or changed rules around landfill gas projects.

“We want the highest possible standard for ACCUs in Australia,” he said.

“The specific criticism or specific projects in question are not the type of practices Qantas uses, and we welcome further scrutiny.”

Mr Parker said Qantas conducted its own extensive due diligence process on the ACCUs it purchased by visiting the project sites once every year to make sure they are fulfilling their regulatory obligation.

These comments came as Qantas unveiled interim sustainability targets for 2030 and a new agreement to explore carbon farming in the West Australian wheat belt region with ANZ and Japanese energy giant Inpex.

The first planting is expected in the winter of 2023, which they then hope to harvest and process, along with selected agricultural waste residues, into low-carbon renewable biofuels for aviation.

It is one of the first major steps in developing a sustainable aviation fuel industry in Australia, into which Qantas has committed to invest $50 million as part of its net-zero plan outlined in 2019.

Government ‘not moving fast enough’ on SAF

Mr Joyce said there had been productive chats with both sides of politics about developing a local industry, but Qantas still had to go overseas to buy sustainable fuels.

“We are incredibly passionate but don’t think either side is moving fast enough,” he said. “We, before COVID-19, spent over $4 billion a year on jet kerosene. We think, for a number of reasons this is a huge opportunity for Australia. The wheat belt project ... will create a huge amount of jobs.”

Qantas last year entered a deal to buy 10 million litres of biofuels from BP at Heathrow Airport to cut with normal aviation fuels on its Kangaroo route to London. On Thursday, it announced a similar deal in the US for 20 million litres of sustainable fuels to fly use at Californian airports beginning in 2025.

“We tried to do this behind the scenes, but unfortunately, you do have to make things public to make things happen and that’s what we are having to do to get there [on local sustainable fuels],” Mr Joyce said.

One of the key goals in the interim sustainability plan was to ensure 10 per cent of Qantas’s fuel mix was sustainable before 2030. Mr Joyce said it would “be a shame” if Qantas has to reach that by sourcing fuel offshore.

Among Qantas’s interim sustainability goals was a target to cut emissions by a quarter before 2030, phase out single-use plastics on flights by 2027 and aim for zero landfill waste by 2030. The company committed to building out its carbon offset program ahead of its broader net-zero by 2050 goal.

Mr Joyce said a benefit of setting these targets now was that it signalled to the market that there was a demand for sustainable aviation fuels.

“That will hopefully encourage more investment and build more momentum for the industry as a whole,” Mr Joyce said

“Responding to climate change is a big challenge, but we will get there. Partnerships with industry and all levels of government are going to be key to create the supply chains we need, and customers will have a role to play as well in supporting more sustainable options,” Mr Joyce added.

Qantas boss Alan Joyce says the Omicron COVID-19 wave has set the airline’s pandemic recovery back by six months and expects domestic and international travel demand to return more slowly than previously anticipated.

The country’s biggest airline on Thursday reported a $1.28 billion underlying loss for the six months to December 31, worse than its $1 billion first-half loss last year, as flying activity fell to just 18 per cent of pre-COVID levels.

Mr Joyce said that with most of Australia in lockdown during parts of the half, the result “isn’t surprising, but it is frustrating”, while adding there had been a “sharp uptick” in international bookings and improved domestic demand in recent weeks.

However, the group cut both domestic and international capacity forecasts for the June quarter across both its Qantas and Jetstar brands.

Domestic flying would be 90 to 100 per cent of pre-COVID levels, down from earlier expectations of 114 per cent while international flying would be 44 per cent, down from 60 per cent, as major markets such as New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong and China delayed opening their borders.

“There’s no doubt Omicron ... did slow down that recovery and there is a tail effect on this,” Mr Joyce said.“It’s pushed everything out by about six months from where we thought we would be.”

Domestic business travel was recovering the slowest, he said, but should bounce back in the coming weeks as the requirement to wear a mask in offices lifts in NSW and Victoria.

“[Removing masks] is a prerequisite to get people flying again, and a lot of corporates are telling us that,” Mr Joyce said.

The Omicron wave will cost Qantas $650 million in the June half, and another $180 million from “inefficiencies” such as bringing all staff back to work even while passenger numbers lagged.

Jarden analyst Jakob Cakarnis said these costs could lead to “meaningful” revisions to market forecasts for Qantas’ full-year earnings.

Qantas shares fell 5 per cent to $5.08 on the result, against a 3 per cent decline on the ASX 200 which was rattled by the military conflict in Ukraine.

Flight Centre managing director Graham Turner said even though Australia’s border was now open, travel was held back by restriction in some of our biggest travel markets like Japan, China, Fiji and Indonesia.

“People aren’t going to travel to Bali and spend three days in a hotel,” he said, after handing down his own half-year results.

However, Mr Turner said that based on discussions with major foreign airlines, international seat capacity into Australia was set to jump from around 22 per cent of pre-COVID levels currently to 60 per cent in April.

“Once the capacity is there everyone can start really pushing the advertising - there’s a lot more marketing and a lot more travelling both outbound and inbound.”

Air New Zealand chief executive Gregg Foran told this masthead on Thursday that only about 9000 people were booked to fly from Australia across the Tasman in the three weeks after Sunday, when the country will let arrivals isolate at home for seven days rather than enter hotel quarantine.

“It’s effectively a blip,” he said, when compared to the flood of travellers crossing the Tasman when the Australia-New Zealand travel bubble was open last year. “It’s good to begin the journey to get that down to a week but until it [the isolation requirement] is actually removed, you just have too much friction for people to travel en masse.”

Flight Centre shares fell 10 per cent to $18.09 on Thursday after it reported a $188 million first-half loss, which $52 million deeper in the red than consensus market forecasts. Mr Turner said the group should be profitable again, on a monthly basis, by the end of the financial year.

Air New Zealand’s dual-listed ASX and NZX listed shares fell 3.4 per cent $1.43, after it reported a statutory after-tax loss of $NZ272 million ($254 million), down from $73 million loss a year earlier.

Qantas reported earnings before interest, depreciation and amortisation of $245 million, which was $41 million worse than analyst consensus forecasts, as revenue grew $744 million to $3.07 billion.

Its statutory loss narrowed from $1 billion to $456 million, however, after it sold a parcel of land at Sydney Airport for $802 million late last year. That helped Qantas lower its net debt from $5.9 billion to $5.5 billion, which is the top of its targeted range and which Mr Joyce said positioned it to order new short-haul and ultra-long haul aircraft this year.

Qantas said it will give rights to 1000 company shares each - worth $5350 at their current price - to its entire workforce - 20,000 non-executive employees who over the past two years had endured long stand-downs and wage freezes.

The rights will convert to shares in August next year, providing the employees stay with Qantas and the company meets key targets in its “COVID recovery plan”. Executives - who have not been paid short-term bonuses during the pandemic - and senior managers will also be eligible for share-based bonuses next year.

Michael McCormack has left the door open to returning as Nationals leader if he wins the support of his colleagues but will not seek to move against Barnaby Joyce in Monday’s party room, as the government responds to a new leaked text message scandal.

Mr McCormack said it was up to Mr Joyce and “others” as to whether the Deputy Prime Minister’s authority was tested in the party room, but confirmed he would not move a spill.

However, he unveiled his ambition to return to the frontbench and flagged his interest in regaining the leadership if he won the support of his colleagues.

“If that comes around again, so be it, it was meant to happen,” Mr McCormack said. “If it doesn’t, I have still got a job to do being the federal member for Riverina or something else that the Prime Minister or the party decides upon me.”

Mr McCormack appeared to suggest that Mr Joyce should resign on Saturday after tweeting that Australian cricket coach Justin Langer was not the person who should have stepped down after damaging text messages sent by Mr Joyce were leaked.

In the leaked text message, Mr Joyce called Scott Morrison a “hypocrite and a liar”. The message was sent last March, when Mr Joyce was still a backbencher, to a third party who then sent it on to former Liberal Party staffer ­Brittany Higgins, who was allegedly raped in Parliament House in 2019.

“He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time,” Mr Joyce wrote. “I have never trusted him and I dislike how he earnestly rearranges the truth to a lie.”

Mr Joyce offered his resignation to the Prime Minister on Thursday when he learnt the messages would be leaked, and has apologised to Mr Morrison. His resignation was not accepted, with Mr Morrison saying on Sunday that he was focused on “getting on with it”.

“Politicians are no different to anyone else and people say things and people feel things,” Mr Morrison said. “People get angry. People get bitter. Of course they do. That’s all of us. And so, who am I to be judging someone else?

“Barnaby and I are getting on with it. We understand the frailties of human beings and if anybody thinks that it’s different in politics to their own lives, they’d be mistaken.”

While Mr McCormack’s tweet was seen by many as a subtle call for Mr Joyce to resign, Mr McCormack argued the tweet was “about cricket”.

“It was about Justin Langer, who reached out to me when the deputy prime minister’s job was changed in June,” Mr McCormack said. “I appreciated the fact that he did and I reciprocated.

“You can read that first sentence any which way you like.”

In his tweet, Mr McCormack said: “Justin Langer’s was not the resignation that should have taken place today.”

Sources close to Nationals deputy leader David Littleproud on Sunday said he had been contacted by colleagues “venting their frustrations” but there was no appetite in the party room for a leadership change.

Mr Littleproud, 45, is viewed as Mr Joyce’s successor and in the event the Coalition loses the election the most likely to run for the leadership.

Other Nationals MPs told The Australian that, while the leaked text was not “ideal”, most people

believed it was not a “hanging offence”.

“We’ve got to put our heads down and get on with the job,” a senior Nationals MP said.

However, in a direct swipe at Mr Joyce, Mr McCormack said he was baffled as to how he could offer his resignation to Mr Morrison when it was a decision for the Nationals party room.

“He can’t resign as the leader of the Nationals, he can only do that in the party room. Or indeed he can do what he did last time and stand up on the hill up in Tamworth and resign.”

When asked if Mr Joyce should call a ballot in Monday’s Nationals partyroom meeting, Mr McCormack said “that would be up to Barnaby and perhaps up to others”.

London: Fully vaccinated Australians travelling to the UK will not have to take a single test before or after their arrival after the British government said it would free the country from the shackles of costly and restrictive bans, quarantine and testing regimes.

British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that COVID-19 travel tests had outlived their usefulness for the fully vaccinated and that they would be scrapped from 4am (local time) on February 11.

“As part of our efforts to ensure that 2022 is the year in which restrictions on travel, on lockdowns and limits on people’s lives are firmly placed in the past, today we are setting Britain free,” he told the Commons. “With these changes today we have one of the most open travel sectors in the world ... today is a momentous moment.

“Because it’s important that we’re able to unlock the borders, people are able to travel again, do business and, most importantly, see family who many people won’t have seen for a very long time because of the prohibitive costs.

“But be in no doubt, it’s only because the government got the big calls right, on vaccination, on boosters, on dealing with Omicron [that] we can now open travel and declare that Britain is open for business.“

All passengers arriving in the UK will still have to complete a passenger locator form to identify unvaccinated and fully vaccinated arrivals, but the form – which currently runs to several pages – will be simplified.

Pre-departure tests will remain for unvaccinated travellers, as will a requirement to take a PCR test on day two after arrival. However, unvaccinated people will not have to self-isolate upon arrival.

The UK also wants to end hotel quarantine for red-list countries and replace it with enforced home quarantine, but only if a variant that is more worrying than Omicron emerges.

There are currently no countries on the red list and Shapps said that the government wanted to turn away from blanket measures in favour of “global sophisticated surveillance.”

Britain’s Omicron cases have plateaued at around 90,000 cases per day, a rate of around 1350 per million. Australia’s COVID-19 cases are higher at around 2454 cases per million people.

Australia’s vaccination rate for those aged 12 years and over is 91.98 per cent compared to the UK’s 83.8 per cent. The UK’s boosted rate is at 64.2 per cent.

The seven-day rolling average death rate per million people was 3.94 for the UK and 2.53 for Australia in the week to January 19.

In the UK, nearly 154,000 people have died within a month of testing positive for the virus following two deadly waves prior to vaccine development.

Shapps conceded the government had not got everything right

“It’s never going to be easy tackling a global pandemic – there’s no rule book, there’s no sort of textbook that tells you what you have to do,” he said.

The unlocking of the travel regime comes in the same week that the last remaining restrictions will be removed.

From Thursday, masks will no longer be required – except on Transport for London – and the limited use of vaccine passports for big events will also end.

Tim Alderslade, from Airlines UK, said international travel was returning to “near normality” for the fully vaccinated.

“It will offer further reassurance to those planning to travel, both overseas and into the UK, and demonstrates again that following the success of the vaccine programme, the UK can lead the world in our recovery from the pandemic,” he said.

Qantas is cutting its network capacity as the Omicron COVID-19 wave prompts Australians to cancel or delay travel plans and threatens to reverse the airline’s predictions of a swift recovery from the pandemic early this year.

Passenger numbers through Australia’s four busiest east-coast airports have tumbled around 20 per cent in recent weeks, as the so-called “shadow lockdown” of people avoiding public spaces pummels the struggling tourism, travel and hospitality sectors.

Qantas said in a statement to the ASX on Thursday afternoon that it now expects domestic capacity for the third quarter of full-year 2022 to be at around 70 per cent of pre-COVID levels, down from the 102 per cent that had been planned. Qantas’s total international capacity for the same period will fall from 30 per cent to around 20 per cent of pre-COVID levels, it said.

Qantas had already been cutting capacity since December according to figures from the aviation data company Cirium. Qantas had 63,068 domestic and international flights scheduled for the first three months of the year on December 3 but by January 7 that a fallen by 9468 to 53600. The leisure-focused Jetstar has cut 3287 flights over the same period, to 23,955 flights, the data shows.

Thursday’s announcement signals an even deeper cut into Qantas’ network.

Virgin Australia said on Monday it would cut almost a quarter of its schedule flights for the remainder of January and February as bookings tumbled and close COVID-19 contact isolation requirements caused a crew shortage.

Passenger data from the Australian Airports Association released to this masthead reveals how sharply travel demand has fallen as COVID-19 case numbers exploded from 1554 nationwide on December 12 to 103,689 on Thursday.

Average daily passenger numbers through Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide airports hit close to 61 per cent of pre-COVID levels during December, but that has tumbled back to 39 per cent so far in January.

“We can see Australians are now more nervous about boarding a flight, largely because they’re worried about contracting the virus far from home and the risk of having to isolate in another state,” said AAA spokeswoman Hannah Maguire.

“There are also concerns around flight cancellations and holiday experiences being impacted due to continued staff shortages in major tourist destinations.

“The aviation industry’s recovery will remain fragile for some time to come, despite most government support initiatives being phased out at the end of December 2021.”

Qantas Group chief executive Alan Joyce said the impact the surge in COVID-19 cases would have on consumer behaviour would be temporary.

“Our focus on cash positive flying remains, notwithstanding some of the costs that we’ll have to absorb from this sudden drop in demand,” Mr Joyce said.

Qantas’ capacity cuts are a reversal of the bullish outlook on its COVID-19 recovery given late last year.

On December 16, it told investors that uncertainty around the spread of Omicron had caused ticket sales to slow in late November but that there had been a “recent improvement”, and forecast it would be flying at above pre-COVID levels domestically by February.

Qantas’ group capacity in the September quarter was only 15 per cent of pre-COVID levels, as Melbourne and Sydney entered lockdowns, and state and international borders remained shut.

Qantas is finding that pilots who have not flown for long periods due to the COVID-19 pandemic are making errors such as commencing take-off with the park brake on, and need more time for routine procedures.

The problems are outlined in an internal Qantas memo obtained by the Heraldand The Age, and underscore the challenges facing airlines worldwide as out-of-practice pilots return to full duties after being stood down.

In the memo, the heads of Qantas’ fleet operations say the two-year disruption from the pandemic had “created a situation where expert pilots have lost recency and experienced a subsequent reduction in cognitive capacity”.

“Combined with reduced flying across the network, we recognise a flow on effect for flight crew’s focus and familiarity with the operation,” they said.

“Routine items that used to be completed with a minimum of effort now occupy more time and divert attention away from flying the aircraft.”

The airline’s flight operations team monitors trends and looks for systemic or repeat events, which they said was “especially important during the disrupted period of operations we have experienced over the last 19 months”.

A summary of recent trends from Qantas pilot reports identified “errors” while planes were on the ground such as “commencing take-off with park brake set” and “misidentification of altitude as airspeed”.

The memo cited on-ground “threats” such as switches on the cockpit panels being in incorrect positions and “exterior inspection events”.

Last June, pilots of a Qantas 787 were unable to retract the plane’s landing gear shortly after taking off from Sydney because two gear pins had not been removed before departure.

Problems encountered while planes were in the air included “preflight switching errors that then led to larger in-flight issues”.

It also highlighted instances of “continued unstable approaches” and “crew looking back at the event and not realising that they were overloaded or had lost situational awareness”.

Mick Quinn, a former head of safety at Emirates and an ex-manager of air-safety investigation at Qantas, said it was difficult to transition pilots back into cockpits after long periods without flying, but one of the solutions for airlines was to maximise training and time spent in flight simulators.

“The only way is training, training and training, and simulator time,” said Mr Quinn, who was the head of NSW’s Office of Transport Safety Investigations for five years until early 2021. “It is also about sticking to the absolute process [in the cockpit] so that everyone is in the same ballpark.”

Mr Quinn said the long periods that pilots were stood down meant when they returned, they had to think twice about what they were doing because of the loss of recency.

Recency is an aviation industry term that refers to pilots reaching a certain number of requirements such as take-offs and landings to be able to fly passenger services.

Similarly, Mr Quinn said he had noticed that his own driving skills were rusty after not being regularly behind the wheel of his car for 18 months during the pandemic.

“We are all people, and we all make mistakes, but the most important thing is how to manage them before they turn bad,” he said.

Mr Quinn said airlines worldwide were facing a similar challenge as large numbers of pilots returned, but he emphasised that significant protections were built into modern aircraft.

A Qantas spokeswoman said airlines around the world were working through the complex process of returning to pre-COVID operations, including bringing back pilots who experienced extended periods on the ground.

“We recognised very early that we needed to think differently about pilot recency, currency and refamiliarisation programs, and so we designed an enhanced return-to-work program fit for the unprecedented challenge facing our industry,” she said.

“Safety is our number one priority and all of the data shows that our pilots are coming back with the skills and confidence to do their job safely.”

In the internal memo, Qantas fleet operations head Alex Scamps also said some pilots would have noticed that fuel had not been discussed in internal communications over the last 18 months.

“There is genuine recognition that it’s difficult to immediately return to the pre-COVID operational state, and you’re fully supported in prioritising safety and compliance over on-time performance,” Captain Scamps said.

Jet fuel is one of the single biggest costs for airlines.

Thousands of Qantas employees who were stood down returned to work in December after the reopening of state and international borders prompted the airline to bring forward the resumption of flights.