Tuesday 14 July 2020 sees VA833, the first VAd flight timetabled on the day at 1000 from MEL to SYD cancelled.
This leaves VAd only operating VA685 from MEL to PER at 1245 hours and later, VA863 to SYD, the 1630 hours mid afternoon.
QFd is not much better, only operating four flights ex MEL tomorrow: one each to CBR, LST, PER and SYD.
JQd has cancelled all flights except one MEL up to SYD.
There are no VAd or QF group flights from MEL to ADL or BNE tomorrow, the latter normally being Australia's third busiest air route for passengers.
Given that Brisbane and Adelaide are respectively Australia's third and fifth largest cities, that's an amazing, unforeseeable situation. Perhaps not 'unparalleled' - the QF Group staff lockout in 2011 may have seen this occur, but it wasn't a six week (42 day) 'lockdown.'
Victoria's 42 day lockdown is really starting to 'bite.' No surface transport either MEL to ADL: 'The Overland' train usually runs westbound on a Tuesday, but is cancelled until 15 September 2020, while V/Line and Firefly have cancelled their road coaches. Few Victorians can obtain entry to SA or for that matter Qld in any case.
AFFer justinbrett suggested in another thread that if COVID-19 case numbers in Melbourne continued to be of concern, passenger numbers MEL - SYD would continue declining. He's correct, but adding to this is the worry in Sydney about that 'Casula Hotel cluster.' As a percentage of the population, coronavirus cases are low, and many will wonder if we're sacrificing the economy (including transport providers and their staff and contractors) and overreacting. A contentious debate.
Even with experience of the first lockdown, it's difficult to imagine many of us could have foreseen that things would get even worse in July 2020. If I thought about it at all, my reaction was 'it can't get any worse than March 2020.'
This inability to operate passenger transport services to and from Australia's second largest city (and not far behind #1, Sydney) would be crimping Bain Capital's efforts to restart VA (though the arrangement still lacks creditors' approval and could conceivably fall over on 21 August 2020 or after that), while the Qantas CEO's efforts to bring losses down to '$40 million a week' would also be under threat. Media suggested he was making good progress but that almost certainly needs revision.