April 2020, and a mate who’d flown Virgin Blue’s red-eye to Brisbane for fifteen years straight rang me with a question nobody had an answer to: would there even be a second airline left by Christmas? That’s not a rhetorical flourish. For a few genuinely strange weeks, it was a live question. Virgin Australia Holdings went into voluntary administration on 21 April 2020, owing somewhere north of $6.8 billion to roughly 10,000 creditors, and the national carrier’s only real domestic rival simply ceased to exist as a going concern overnight.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the brand, if not always the balance sheet. Virgin Blue launched in August 2000 out of a shed-like operation at Brisbane Airport with two secondhand…