Qantas expects to get back to flying 100% of its pre-COVID-19 domestic capacity by January as Australian state borders open up due to surging vaccination rates, the airline's CE said on Thursday. "It looks like by Christmas we will have every state open except for Western Australia, and Western Australia will open up domestically hopefully early in the new year, we assume around February," Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said at an industry conference held by Flight Centre Travel Group. Travel restrictions between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's largest cities, eased on Wednesday as Victoria opened its borders to fully vaccinated residents from New South Wales amid a rapid rise in immunisation levels. With cases trending lower in New South Wales, including Sydney, residents will be allowed quarantine-free entry into Victoria for the first time in more than three months. Travellers from Melbourne who wish to enter Sydney, however, must undergo a two-week home quarantine.<br/>
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Qantas engineers are preparing for the airline's fleet to ramp up international flying starting Nov. 1, when Sydney opens to fully vaccinated citizens and permanent residents without quarantine. With the exception of its Airbus A380 super-jumbos, which remain stored in the Mojave Desert in California, most of Qantas' international fleet has already been doing some limited flying on cargo and repatriation flights. "What we do is have them on a bit of a part-time schedule so they have been doing one day a week rather than seven days a week," said John Walker, the airline's head of line maintenance. Australia applied strict border rules in March 2020 that stopped citizens from exiting without special permission and required two weeks of hotel quarantine for all arrivals, leading Qantas to stop regular international passenger flights. Qantas engineering staff at Sydney Airport on Thursday were checking brakes and tyres and catching up on some minor maintenance work on its fleet of A330 planes that were flying on lighter schedules. "For this aircraft, if it were in a deep sleep, it would be over 1,000 man hours with full crews of 12 or 15 to wake the plane up," Walker said. "We started doing these wake-ups many, many months ago." In California, Qantas has a team of engineers in Los Angeles that regularly drives two hours to the Mojave Desert to carry out checks on the A380 fleet, he said.<br/>