I couldn't help but notice the gate attendant on my own Virgin flight from Melbourne this week checked in passengers without status who simply jumped across from the other boarding lane. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Virgin have perfected the solution. At the end of the day, it simply...

Singapore Airlines are certainly dominating this route, particularly now that it's an all-A350 service.

I wonder where Virgin would find the (estimated) $700m to fund the purchase, especially given that they have already tallied $1.9b in losses over the last 7 years.

Interesting he mentioned Tokyo-Cairns as an example of a route that this aircraft can serve. I wonder how many slots are available at Narita/Haneda to cater for the expected increase in narrowbody services for niche routes ?

In short, no. To quote Alan Joyce from another AusBT article, "Brisbane has an advantage: it’s closer to a lot more (US) destinations than Sydney or Melbourne, so that gives us the ability to do things like Dallas, or to do other cities in the States that we can’t do from any other...