I shudder to think that all of these photos were taken over 5 years ago now. Half a decade. Every identifiable aircraft that we have seen to date is no longer with its then owner, although you could make the point that the AirAsia X aircraft that was transferred to its parent company is still in the same service, more or less.

This is the first one that I can identify that is still with its then operator. More or less, anyway. In reality, the company that was then "Virgin Australia", a publicly listed company, hit the wall between April and June 2020 after the pandemic slaughtered its business. The government was not inclined to bankroll it despite giving copious quantities of money to Qantas. (To be fair, Qantas is still majority Australian owned whereas you could make the case that Virgin Australia was effectively a foreign airline.) In any event, in June 2020 the company (or what was left of it) was bought out by Bain Capital.

In any case, Virgin Australia is still flying both domestically, and internationally. Unfortunately, the international part is only to the US and a few other places like Bali. They don't go to Europe. That's unfortunate because I believe that their frequent-flier system is better than Qantas's, not that that's saying much. The Qantas Frequent Flyer program strikes me as working on a very simple principle; "we take as much as we can, we give you as little as possible and ideally nothing". That's really not hard to beat.

This is a Boeing 737-800 (737-8FE), registration VH-YIU. It is reported as having been built and delivered in 2013, so it has been racking up the miles for a while now. A check of the Flight Aware website shows that it is, as of August 2022, still shuttling between various East Coast cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, as well as the occasional trip to Bali.

(Edit, 27 May 2023: I started writing up the comments for this gallery in August 2022 but as of May 2023 I still had not posted any of the photos, because I wanted to get ALLLLL of the comments done. That's becoming the never ending story. So today is "Go Day" on that. Despite the title this is actually closer to 6 years on now, and VH-YIU? It's still in service with Virgin, with its next slated flight being Brisbane to Bali later this morning.)

On this occasion, it's saving its engines and is being pulled along at a nice leisurely pace by an aircraft tug.