Fly Corporate Melbourne route to continue despite Victorian lockdown

Tamworth residents have been able to book flights to the Victorian capital since March, something they couldn't do before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The airline's Manager Airline Network Jeff Boyd said the service is likely to continue flying over the closed NSW-Victoria border, depending on government rules.

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"We're just waiting to see what the NSW government puts out in the way of exempted travellers," he said.

"For the last nine weeks, since we've been doing the subsidised flights for the government, we've been operating in and out of Tamworth to Brisbane, and Brisbane's had a closed border.

"So we're just waiting to see if there's similar sort of exemptions apply that have applied to the Queensland border. If they do then we still believe there'd be enough traffic for us to keep operating.

"By nature of what the flights are they are to provide essential travel for essential services and essential people that need to travel or essential freight."

The border is set to slam shut to all but people on essential work at midnight on Tuesday night. Travellers will require a permit to come back and forth, as the state of Victoria soon returns to a full-scale lockdown to choke out an outbreak of the pandemic in parts of Melbourne.

But Tamworth Chamber of Commerce President Jye Segboer said the lockdown and border closure are unlikely to have much of an economic impact on our region.

"From a tourism perspective until we actually see events start to come back in play, we're not going to see many tourists from that region enter into our region," he said.

"From a corporate perspective and a business perspective it certainly will effect us in terms of the corporate market not being able to come to regional NSW.

"However until flights continue to increase we were not seeing the demand that we have in the past anyway because of the distance that somebody has to drive.

"We're not expecting that it will overly effect our region too much at all."

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Victorians do tend to use Tamworth as a stopping-over point on the journey to Queensland or the coast of NSW during summer, but winter travel business is much weaker, he said.

Mr Segboer said the biggest impact the Victorian lockdown would have in Tamworth is scaring people back into practicing proper social distancing.

"People are still not practicing social distancing, people are still not following guidelines," he said.

"You see people walking in and out of shopping centres and shops and restaurants and there's hand sanitizing stations and they're not utilising them.

"It only takes one person and then all of a sudden we've got another issue on our hands."

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Tenterfield Mayor Peter Petty has had plenty of experience with border closures, living just one kilometre from Queensland - and on the opposite side to his favourite pub, the Jennings Hotel.

He said southerners would have a tough couple of weeks, but would quickly get used to it.

"They're a lot bigger scale than us, and I really feel for them in these early stages.

"I was listening to mayor Kevin Mack this morning and he said they have 55 places they can cross the border; I wish them well."

Fly Corporate Manager Jeff Boyd said the airline is still considering whether to continue the three-stop 'milk run' route, which became financially viable during the coronavirus pandemic thanks to Commonwealth subsidies, after the crisis ends.

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