Domestic airlines have sold thousands of seats in the past 24 hours and will triple flights on some routes as borders reopen and new Covid cases continue to drop. South Australia is set to open its borders to New South Wales on Wednesday night, after NSW registered no new cases of community transmission for the second day in a row. On Tuesday, NSW recorded two new cases of Covid-19, both returned travellers, and on Wednesday it recorded six new cases, all among returned travellers. On Tuesday, Queensland announced that residents of regional NSW will be allowed into the state from 1 October. ACT residents were also given the green light to fly into Queensland last week. Qantas and Jetstar said they will boost domestic flights as a result of the borders reopening, and have already sold 6,500 seats across the two brands in the past 24 hours. Jetstar will double its flight volume between NSW and SA from the current once a day to twice a day, starting on 1 October. That will rise to three times a day by 1 November. The budget airline has also launched a temporary sale for flights between Sydney and Adelaide, offering $59 flights, one way, from mid-October. Virgin Australia will restart its flights between Canberra and Adelaide, running return three times a week. Daily flights will start between Adelaide and Sydney on 2 October, rising to twice a day from 2 November. Daily return flights between Brisbane and Canberra will also be running by the end of October. From Thursday, Qantas will restart its Sydney to Adelaide route, which has been dormant since July.<br/>
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Qantas is salvaging almost anything to get through the pandemic. Now it’s peddling $1,000 loaded bar carts after stripping them from grounded planes. The airline is selling 1,000 carts taken from Boeing 747s before the jumbos were retired early as the virus halted overseas travel. Delivered to your home, a stocked, full-size cart is going for $1,474.70 ($1,043). A half cart costs A$974.70. Qantas has already sold 10,000 sets of pajamas, all snapped up within a few hours, and is also selling tickets for sight-seeing flights around Australia. The airline is cutting as many as 8,500 jobs, and this month said it may move its Sydney headquarters to another city as part of a cost review. Each cart typically has 2,000 flights under its belt. They go on sale Thursday through the airline’s frequent-flyer wine business. <br/>
Malaysia's national carrier has deferred by six months payments to holders of RM1.5b (S$492m) in Islamic bonds, CIMB Investment Bank, the facility agent, said. In a notice on a central bank website, CIMB Investment Bank said Malaysia Airlines issued deferral notices last week on periodic distribution amounts due on Sept 30 for RM1.5b nominal value unrated perpetual sukuk musharakah. Payments will resume at the next periodic distribution date on March 31 next year, it added in the notice, filed on Tuesday. Malaysia Airlines, which had struggled financially even before the outbreak, said in April it had made cost cuts and was working with sole shareholder Khazanah Nasional for support to ride out the crisis.<br/>
Rachel Starr Davis, a single mother of a 2-year-old, is urging the airline industry to revise their face mask policies after she was kicked off a flight because her son refused to wear a face covering. Davis, her mother and her son were on the final leg home from a business trip in Florida on an American Airlines flight September 17 after Hurricane Sally forced the cancellation of their original flights back to New Hampshire, Davis said. Despite her repeated efforts to get her son to wear a face mask, Davis said, he wouldn't keep it on his face. "It gets to the point where I'm crying so hard, I'm hysterical, I can't even get a deep breath because my mask kept sucking into my mouth," she said. "And then I'm shaking holding this piece of cloth to my son's face so that we can take off and they (flight crew) were standing over me in the aisle saying they had to watch me repeatedly put the mask on him." As she went to her seat toward the back of the plane, Davis said, a flight attendant asked whether she had a ticket for her son and said he, too, needed to wear a mask. Davis said she tried to work with her son, showing him a few different masks and trying to get him to keep it on his face, but he wasn't having it. Eventually everyone was told to deplane. Davis said she, her mother and her son were not allowed to get back on. Davis said they were deemed non-compliant with the airline's face mask policy. Davis, her mother and her son were put on an American Airlines flight later that day. Davis said her son was not asked by the flight crew to wear a face mask during that trip.<br/>