Qantas sees more passengers

JAKARTA (JP): Qantas Airways of Australia transported some 214,000 passengers from Jakarta to Australia in the first nine- months of this year.

An executive of the air carrier's Jakarta office, Fonny Tedjakusmana, said here yesterday that most of the passengers went to Sydney, followed by Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane.

She said that some 194,000 passengers flew to Sydney from Jakarta in the January to September period.

Qantas directly links Jakarta and the four Australian cities with a total of 14 flights per week, using Boeing B747 and B767 jets. The company, which also serves the Denpasar-Darwin route five times per week, competes with Garuda Indonesia and Ansett International in the same market.

Tedjakusmana said that the number of passengers flying Qantas from Indonesia in the fiscal year ending May 1997 increased 10 percent compared with the previous corresponding period.

She said that Qantas still waited for approval from the Indonesian government for a new service linking Cairns and Timika in Irian Jaya. (icn)