Northern Territory based carrier Airnorth has announced it's launching flights between Cairns and Alice Springs, which will run three times a week from mid-April.
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00:00From one view to last a lifetime, to another, now as close as it's ever been.
00:09We looked at doing direct flights to Cairns this April coming for Easter and it would have been 36 hours of being in transit and airport and terminals and that definitely was not ideal.
00:20A direct flight, Alice Springs to Cairns, most welcome for us.
00:25With one airline scaling back its flights to the territory, another's expanding.
00:30It's just so wonderful to see how everybody working together can actually achieve what some people would have claimed was impossible.
00:39Six years ago Qantas cut its long-running Cairns to Alice route.
00:43In 2014 budget carrier Tiger Air left the town after only a year and Bonza went under last year, not long after first touching down.
00:53But after successfully adding in Alice Springs Perth flight last year and with a taxpayer funded incentive through the territory's airline attraction scheme, Air North's not deterred.
01:05Air North's been flying from Darwin and probably from this hangar for 46 years so we understand the market and we don't jump in without understanding the business case behind it.
01:18With the flights to Cairns set to cost between $300 and $400 each way, tourism operators are cautiously optimistic but...
01:27Any flight that comes out of Cairns that's going to Alice Springs has to be cheaper than any flight that goes from Cairns to The Rock so it must be cheaper and also it's got to travel every single day.
01:38With one new flight getting up in the air, the question now, how does the territory build more things to do on the ground?
01:45We need better product, we need more open product, we need to enhance what is there for people to do.
01:52After the new government's policing blitz in Alice Springs, some say things are looking up.
01:57We have been splashed across the national headlines and now we are able to showcase all the amazing positive things that our town is so proud of.
02:08High hopes for an economy in need.