Mt Cook 1983 plan a lesser threat?

Press, 29 August 1986, Page 4

Mt Cook 1983 plan a lesser threat?

By

LES BLOXHAM

travel editor

Air New Zealand would face a far less daunting level of main trunk competition if Mount Cook Airlines had been able to proceed with the expansion plans it had drawn up in 1983, according to a former managing director of the Mount Cook Group, Mr Philip Phillips. Mr Phillips is convinced that Newmans Air would not have got off the ground had the Mount Cook company adopted his strategy to modernise its aircraft and introduce a modest degree of competition on Air New Zealand’s Auckland-Welling-ton-Christchurch routes. Mr Phillips, a senior research fellow in tourism industry management at Massey University, was managing director and chief executive of the Mount Cook Group from 1978 to 1985. He was given 30 minutes warning of “earlv retirement” by the chairman of the company, Mr Bill Steele, and Mr Murray Hunter, an Air New Zealand representative on

the board, on November 5, 1984. In an interview with “The Press” from Palmerston North yesterday, Mr Phillips said the National Government’s White Paper on the deregulation of internal air services in 1982 originally proposed open competition on all domestic routes except the main trunk. “With the board's backing. we mounted a pretty intensive lobbying campaign in Wellington to persuade the Government to open up the main trunk routes as well,” he said. “Ultimately, the Government decided to deregulate the lot “In 1983 we took a serious look at buying two Bae 146 passenger jets from British Aerospace, and in order to justify the expense, I proposed’ that we should utilise them for a couple of hours at peak times each day in direct competition with Air New Zealand between Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

“It was never our intention to come up with a mini N.A.C. It would have meant only modest competition for Air New Zealand as we would have used the aircraft for the rest of the rime on the tourist routes. Utilisation was the name of the game,” he said.

Mr Phillips said he was unaware at the time that Air New Zealand was negotiating with New Zealand Insurance to buy its shareholding in the Mount Cook company. “It soon became pretty obvious that my strategy for the development of the airline would have got in the way of their plans,” he said. “We had the ball at our feet, but lost it” Mr Phillips said he considered it rather ironic that Air New Zealand and its subsidiary, the Mount Cook Group, were now both having to face up, reluctantly, to the prospect of very intense competition.