The official Philippine Airlines website states:
"With the removal of the Darwin stopover by March 25, PAL will temporarily suspend its flights to Darwin, considering that a stand-alone Manila-Darwin service would be uneconomically sustainable. The airline will revisit this decision in the near future as market conditions improve."
Two things stand out:
- This is a temporary suspension of flights. Airlines have previously announced suspensions which have mostly become permanent but occasionally flights are resumed.
- The airline will revisit this decision in the near future as market conditions improve. There is no mention of when the near future is or what improvement in market conditions means.
The current service to be suspended is a full service, two class flight that uses Darwin simply as a stopover for technical reasons and suffers from the lack of domestic cabotage.
The Darwin stopover was never designed to cater for Darwin passengers as Darwin was just a necessary refueling point for the A320 aircraft used by Philippine Airlines. In the absence of domestic cabotage (the ability for a foreign airline to carry domestic passengers) for every Darwin passenger carried, Philippine Airlines could not carry a Brisbane passenger. This meant that prices charged to Darwin passengers needed to be generally around the same as those charged to Brisbane passengers flying twice the distance. The odds were very much stacked against Darwin from the start.
However, a dedicated Darwin service using Philippine Airlines' low cost subsidiary PAL Express or Cebu Pacific, might just work.
Online others have even suggested that Darwin's own Airnorth could operate Darwin-Manila as a regular route. Airnorth certainly has a suitably sized aircraft in the Embraer 170 and they have operated to Manila as a charter in the past. But their cost structure and operating cost probably can't match the Philippine low-cost carriers.