If there's one issue that never really goes away for Australia's aviation sector, it's airfares. Massive demand has pushed prices up, according to the ACCC, with October airfares at their highest since 2022, despite both Qantas Group and Virgin Australia adding extra capacity.

To make matters worse for those out west, the WA government is set to increase caps for regional airfares during "high-demand" periods, while the spectre of rising airfares also appears to have spooked Canberra into nixing plans for an EU-style "pay-on-delay" scheme.

On this week's Australian Aviation Podcast, Jake and David look at the factors putting the squeeze on Australian travellers' wallets, and whether newer, larger, and more efficient aircraft might bring some relief.

Plus, the last Qantas A380 comes home, skydiving instructors jump off the job, and is Australia playing catch-up on border processing technology?

If you were looking to fly anywhere in Australia this past weekend: we're so sorry to hear it. Between a fire at Melbourne Airport, the grounding of half of Jetstar's A320 fleet, and a nationwide passport processing outage, delays and cancellations plagued travellers for three days straight.

Now that everything has (thankfully) returned to normal, what exactly was the deal with that Airbus software update – and what does it mean for the workhorse A320, one of the most popular passenger aircraft types in the world?

On this week's podcast, Jake, David and Bethany sift through the ashes of a chaotic weekend in the skies, and analyse the aftermath of the A320 grounding.

Plus, Virgin's flirtation with ChatGPT, international traffic continues to surge, and how safe is it to step on board a hot-air balloon?

With outdated and confusing systems and processes common across the aviation industry, safety and compliance can be a thorny problem for many businesses, with "data silos" holding up procedures.

OneReg, a New Zealand-based company, aims to change all that, moving businesses away from cluttered folders of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs to centralise compliance on one easy-to-use platform.

With customers across Australia, New Zealand, the UK and EU, and the Middle East, OneReg is looking to enable industry-wide data sharing to help the aviation sector move away from tick-box compliance and into a new "gold standard".

On this podcast, Jake Nelson talks to Clint Cardozo and Carly Waddleton from OneReg on the perils of data silos in aviation, and how to streamline the regulatory compliance process.