OzJet Airlines and Outback Air are two subsidiary Australian airlines owned by AirOz Pty Limited, an aviation holding company headquartered on the grounds of Alice Springs Airport (ASP) in Connellan, Northern Territory, Australia, where both airlines are based.
Outback Air is an Australian regional airline subsidiary established in 1947 that provides scheduled, charter and ad hoc flight services to more than 100 airports and landing strips located throughout Australia. Outback Air uses a selection of turboprop and piston-prop aircraft to carry a mix of passengers and freight to remote outback locations.
OzJet is a low-cost Australian national airline subsidiary established in 2018, that provides scheduled and charter air service to 18 destinations within Australia along with international air service to Denpasar-DPS in Bali, Indonesia. It uses Airbus A220 airliners to carry passengers between cities as well as to/from select resort locales.
In addition to Alice Springs-ASP, the company also maintains focus city level operations for both airlines at Darwin-DRW, Northern Territory; Broken Hill-BHQ, New South Wales; Kalgoorlie-KGL, Western Australia; and Mount Isa-ISA, Queensland.
History
Alice Air Charters Pty 1947-1977
Alice Air Charters Pty (AAC) was founded in February 1947 by Ted Stansbury, one of Australia’s top RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) fighter aces during World War II, credited with at least 25 confirmed victories. With help from roughly 500 small scale investors, Mr Stansbury was able to establish AAC with the acquisition of two war surplus Douglas DC-4s, two Douglas DC-3s, and a pair of Piper J-3 Cubs. Mr Stansbury, whose aviator callsign during WWII was “Boxer” because he was a noted pugilist before and during the war, adopted his wartime mascot, a cartoon baby kangaroo wearing boxing gloves in a fighting stance, to become the company’s tail logo.
Mr Conagher hired a coterie of fellow WWII pilots to fly for the company, including one of the first Aboriginal fighter pilots, Billijee “Billy” Gidarra (1924-1995). Mr Gidarra and Mr Stansbury first met as opponents in a RAAF boxing match at Morotai in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), in which Billy ended up winning by a split decision. The two remained friends for life, and Mr Gidarra worked steadily for the airline until retiring in 1992 as a Vice President of the company.
After raising its hangars at Alice Springs-ASP and Darwin-DRW, in May 1947 AAC began to fly passengers and freight in and around the Northern Territory, as well as to some portions of neighboring Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland. The DC-4s ran scheduled flights along the north-to-south corridor encompassing Alice Springs-ASP, Darwin-DRW and Adelaide-ADL, while the DC-3s were used to perform “milk run” flights branching out to numerous smaller communities around the region.
The Piper Cubs were intended to be bush planes carrying out ad hoc flights to ferry smaller packages or the occasional single passenger to far flung locations. In 1949 the company acquired a pair of de Havilland Australia DHA-3 Drovers and an additional war surplus DC-3, enabling the company to better serve these more remote airstrips, so the Cubs were sold away. In 1956 AAC brought on a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter to serve as a true bush plane, because it could readily carry up to 6 passengers or 2,000 pounds of freight to the shortest and most rugged airstrips.
In 1967, Alice Air Charters became one of the first Australian carriers to take delivery of the de Havilland DHC-6-300 Twin Otter. The company configured these Twin Otters to work as quick change combi aircraft, whereby passenger seats could be added or removed as needed with an hour’s notice. These Twin Otters quickly became the backbone of the company’s fleet, and the company sold off the DHA-3 Drovers and DHC-3 Otters. Twin Otters continue to fly regularly for Outback Air as of this writing.
Air NT 1977-1998
By 1977, Mr Stansbury had managed to buy out the interests of the company’s remaining investors to take full control of the business. Where previously AAC was spread out between Alice Springs-ASP and Darwin-DRW, he consolidated its headquarters at ASP. But seeing as the company still had a strong presence in Darwin-DRW, he renamed the business as Air NT to reflect this. Mr Stansbury also designed a new green and gold livery scheme depicting a grown kangaroo standing in front of a symbolic sun, to replace the WWII vintage baby kangaroo-boxer logo. The new scheme was placed on all of the company’s planes except, for one of the two original bare-metal Douglas DC-4s, which continued using the original old-school livery.
That same year, Mr Stansbury bought several Beechcraft Super King Air 250s, configuring some to serve as strictly passenger aircraft while others were converted to be dedicated freighters. By this time the carrier had acquired numerous support contracts to fly passengers and freight to and from airstrips across much of Outback Australia, especially to support mines and other industrial sites as well as outback sheep and cattle stations and aboriginal communities.
In 1985, the company was experiencing a boom in business supporting the expansion of the local Pine Gap military base. Mr Stansbury needed to find more pilots to fly his aircraft. One of the pilots he hired was a young, semi-itinerant crop duster pilot from Texas named David Conagher, whom he nicknamed Yank. He helped Mr Conagher get a proper Australian pilot’s license, and together with the very experienced Mr Gidarra, Mr Conagher quickly became one of the carrier’s go-to men to fly in and out of remote backcountry airstrips all across the Australian Outback.
In 1988, all of the Douglas DC-3s and one of the two original Douglas DC-4s were retired after 41 years’ service with the company.
The following year, Messrs Stansbury and Conagher visited the United States to attend the 1989 EAA Annual Convention and Fly-In at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where they were introduced to a new, futuristic looking twin engine turboprop called the Beechcraft Starship. Mr Stansbury was so enamored with the aircraft that he purchased two of them with plans for them to carry business executives around the Outback.
Mr Gidarra thought the idea of using the Starships in the Australian Outback was daft, and got onto Mr Conagher for allowing Mr Stansbury to buy them unchallenged. But the Beechcraft Starships did their job ably enough, and they proved to be something of a hit with Aussie industrialists as well as the occasional celebrity or Australian rock band making forays out into the “Dead Heart” country.
Mr Gidarra finally retired in 1992 after 45 years with the carrier, and Mr Conagher became the new Chief Pilot and Vice President of Operations.
In 1998 Mr Stansbury died following a sudden illness. He surprised everyone when he used his will to order the company to become a jointly held venture between Mr Conagher and Mr Stansbury’s daughter, Dora Stansbury-Goodhardt. Mr Conagher was given 51% and Ms Stansbury-Goodhardt retained 49%. Despite having already lived in Australia for over 13 years, Mr Conagher was still a US citizen and never got around to taking Australian citizenship. He had to quickly apply for Australian citizenship in order to take formal control of the company.
Outback Air 1998-Present
The late Ted Stansbury was quite a character, beloved by many and serving as the grand marshal in countless Anzac Day parades throughout the years across Australia, and once even in Christchurch, New Zealand.
However Mr Stansbury’s handling of Air NT’s finances, while not exactly horrible, weren’t entirely spot on either. Yank Conagher quickly found the company was in substantial debt, though thankfully not irreparably so. To get things back in balance Mr Conagher had to sell off the Beechcraft Starships and replace the Beechcraft Super King Air 250s with a set of leased Cessna 208B Grand Caravans. While the Cessnas were slower and had less range than the King Airs, they carried more passengers and also cost much less to purchase and operate.
Mr Conagher also retired the last Douglas DC-4, which was cleaned up and placed on display at a roundabout near the Alice Springs-ASP airport, as a tribute to Mr Stansbury. The DC-4 was replaced by two leased de Havilland Canada DHC-8 Q200 turboprop aircraft.
To better reflect the fact that the airline was now flying across several states in the Australian outback, the airline was renamed as Outback Air, but otherwise the company retained the 1977-era Kangaroo-Sun logo. On the carrier’s new Q200 flagship aircraft, a replica of the original 1947 Alice Air Charters boxing baby kangaroo logo was placed between the front door and the cockpit.
In 2016 Outback Air purchased two new de Havilland Canada DHC-8 Q400QCC quick change combi turboprop aircraft, increasing the carrier’s ability to deliver up to 50 passengers alongside heavy freight loads to and from mining sites and aboriginal communities.
OzJet 2018-Present
While attending the Farnborough Air Show in 2012 to make his planned purchase of two Bombardier DHC-8 Q400s, Mr Conagher also decided to arrange for the purchase and delivery of several Bombardier CS100s and Bombardier CS300s jet airliners.
It was not an impulse purchase; he had been planning for years to break into the national jet airline market using a low cost carrier (LCC) model, and had been working to obtain gate access at several Australian airports beyond just Alice Springs-ASP and Darwin-DRW. Mr Conagher originally intended to use Embraer E190s and/or E195s as a springboard into the national airline scheme of things. But his visit with Bombardier left him convinced that the CSeries jets were truly game changing equipment. So he signed off and made a down payment for an audacious order of 30 aircraft - 15 C100s and 15 C300s - without having actually arranged for the necessary financing, a very risky thing to do.
He initially struggled to fund the outright purchase of his aircraft order, but managed to make a deal with JetStream Aerospace to simply lease them instead. After numerous delays and events nearly scuttled the project, in 2018 Bombardier entered a partnership with Airbus that rebranded the Bombardier CS100 and CS300 aircraft as the Airbus A220-100 and A220-300, respectively. Mr Conagher established AirOz Pty Limited as a new holding company for his increasingly diverse aviation activities, and shortly thereafter the first A220s began arriving.
On 27 April 2018 the new low cost airline OzJet officially began operations, with an inaugural A220-300 flight between Sydney-SYD and Melbourne-MEL, followed by an A220-100 flight between Darwin-DRW and Sydney-SYD. Over time, OzJet became a popular customer choice and by early 2024 it was flying 28 aircraft to 18 destinations around Australia.
OzJet’s profitability ultimately helped the company bounce back from losses caused by the Covid 19 pandemic and also helped to ensure that Outback Air would remain viable as well. The carrier also helped transport medicine, supplies and first responders around the country during that difficult time.
Meanwhile, Mr Conagher set about updating Outback Air’s fleet, especially their de Havilland Dash 8s, with newer equipment. At the 2019 Paris Air Show he inked a deal with Aria Aircraft Company to buy 6 Aria V42qc eVTOL Quick Change combi aircraft. The V42qc’s ability to carry any combination of cargo and/or up to 42 passengers, along with its groundbreaking vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) technology, combined to make the aircraft a logical choice to use in connecting to remote Outback destinations far and wide.
In 2023, OzJet began its first international air service to Denpasar-DPS in Bali, Indonesia, flying there from 6 Australian cities. This new service proved exceedingly popular and quite lucrative.
As of 2024, David “Yank” Conagher continues to run both OzJet and Outback Air from the same hangar and offices where the company began back in 1947. He has indicated plans to retire within the next couple of years, but doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to do so just yet.
Destinations
Ozjet
OzJet flies scheduled services to the following destinations.
Adelaide-ADL, SA
Alice Springs-ASP, NT - HQ and Hub
Ballina-Byron Bay-BNK, NSW
Brisbane-BNE, QLD
Broken Hill-BHQ, NSW
Broome-BME, WA
Cairns-CNS, Qld
Canberra-CBR, ACT
Darwin-DRW, NT - Focus City
Denpasar-DPS, Indonesia
Hobart-HBA, Tas
Gold Coast-OOL, Qld
Kalgoorlie-KGI, WA
Melbourne-MEL, Vic
Mount Isa-ISA, Qld
Perth-PER, WA
Sunshine Coast-MCY, Qld
Sydney-SYD, NSW
Townsville-TSV, Qld
Outback Air
Outback Air Destination Map (partial) [link]
Outback Air flies an assortment of scheduled, charter and ad hoc flights to 130+ airports and landing strips throughout Australia, operating primarily from bases located at the following airports.
Alice Springs-ASP, NT
Broken Hill-BHQ, NSW
Darwin-DRW, NT
Kalgoorlie-KGL, WA
Mount Isa-ISA, Qld
Fleet
Current Fleet
OzJet currently operates the following aircraft.
Airbus A220-100 - 2018-Present
Airbus A220-300 - 2018-Present
Outback Air currently operates the following aircraft.
Cessna 208B Grand Caravan - 1998-Present - retiring by 2025
Daher Kodiak 900 - 2023-Present
de Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter - 1969-Present - retiring by 2025
de Havilland Canada DHC-8 Q200 - 1998-Present - retiring by 2025
de Havilland Canada DHC-8 Q400QCC - 2016-Present - retiring by 2026
Former Fleet
Beechcraft Super King Air 250 - 1977-1998
Beechcraft Super King Air 250SM Freighter - 1977-1998
Beechcraft Starship - 1989-1998
de Havilland Australia DHA-3 Drover - 1949-1967
de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter - 1956-1969
Dornier 328-120 Combi - 1995-2022
Douglas DC-3 - 1947-1988
Douglas DC-4 - 1947-1998
Piper J-3 Cub - 1947-1949
Future Fleet
Aria V42qc eVTOL Quick Change Combi - deliveries beginning in 2024
=Nota Bene=
A real life OzJet once existed 2005-2012 as a small scheduled and charter carrier. It originally was set to be a low cost airline, then reimagined as an all-business class airline. The carrier passed through various hands before it was declared insolvent in 2012.
I simply repurposed the airline name, but everything else - the livery, route network, characters and other elements - are items of my own design.Outback Air and Alice Air Charters are entirely original brand names - or at least they didn’t bring up anything in Wikipedia or Google Search before I used them.
There is no historical record of an airline named Air NT previously existing either. There is a Darwin-based not-for-profit organization named Australian Independent Retirees, whose Northern Territory chapter coincidentally uses the acronym AIR NT. They seem like very nice folks, but my own version of Air NT is unrelated to them.
Several years ago I wrote up a treatment for a proposed TV series to be set in the Australian outback, featuring a small aviation company headquartered at Alice Springs-ASP. That company was going to be named Air Oz. Nothing came of that proposal. I decided to reuse some of the info from that old project here.
Ted Stansbury and David “Yank” Conagher were actually named characters from that old story. Same thing with Billijee “Billy” Gidarra, although with a slight name change.
Billy Gidarra is entirely a fictional character, but he was slightly based on a real life World War II Aboriginal fighter pilot, Warrant Officer Len Waters, who was the only Aboriginal fighter pilot to enter combat during World War II, logging 95 missions. He tried to start a real life regional airline himself, but he was unable to get the funding and approvals to do it, so… he ended up going back to his pre-war occupation shearing sheep for a living. He did get some accolades later after his death, like a postage stamp about him and some parks and streets and such named in his honor, but for the most part after WWII he got the shorter end of life’s stick, which is a shame.
I might create a fictional aviation service, perhaps a scrappy charter service in outback Queensland, to give Mr Waters a better fictional outcome than he received in real life. Mr Gidarra at least had it better.The Daher Kodiak 900 and de Havilland DHC-6-300 Twin Otter aircraft templates used in this article were both entirely created from scratch by me.
The various other aircraft templates displayed in the article were licensed from Norebbo and modified to feature liveries that were designed and painted by me.