I’ve been relatively lucky. I book the red-eye return flight every time I visit my family in Perth, and I always fly there from Sydney instead of where I’m based in Canberra even if means an extra 3-hour bus ride. I always choose overseas flights with the most inconvenient stopovers (all purely to save money), and I’ve done my fair share of flying over the years.

This week, though, I was chatting with a friend here in Canberra who told me she had taken only two flights in her life.

“Do you not have much of a desire to travel?” I asked her out of curiosity. “I would love to go to Melbourne,” she said. “But I think I’ve just learned to suppress those desires because I never had much money and flights are so expensive.”

Having an additional airline in Australia might be easier said than done, but there are ways to do it.Credit: Matt Davidson

While most Australians are no stranger to flying for work, family or pleasure, it’s not something all of us can do – and it’s a mode of transport most of us would probably use more if we could afford it.

Of course, flying is a contributor to our greenhouse gasses (Australia’s aviation sector accounts for about 5 per cent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions). So until we have more commercially available zero-emissions flights, it may not be all bad that flights are as expensive as they are, limiting the amount of non-essential travel we do by air.

But it’s also true that Australia’s airlines – and especially the two major ones: Qantas and Virgin – pocket a tidy profit, flying off with more of our money than similar airlines serving our friends overseas. In 2023, the local airline industry estimated the profit margins of Australia’s carriers to be between 8 and 10 per cent – far higher than the global average.

We’ve known for........

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