Every frequent flyer’s nightmare lurched closer to reality when Qantas reported its February operating statistics to the ASX this morning. Jetstar domestic reached exactly 50% of the size of Qantas mainline domestic jet flights for the month if measured by head count, boarding 632,000 passengers compared  to 1,264,000 passengers on the ‘full service’ brand.

This was never supposed to happen. When Jetstar began flying on May 25, 2004, jolly Magda Szubanski was on board as the Jetstar persona to make fun of the thought that full-sized business passengers would ever have to fit into Jetstar seats.

No. Jetstar was all about ‘fun’, and low fares in very tiny seats flying to places where you took the kids on school holidays, held your stomach in all the way to the Gold Coast, and thought about all the dollars you had saved while trying to suck on a tinnie at twice the price of a cold beer in a pub.

Fast forward to now, and Jetstar is everywhere — almost. The low-cost brand that was never going to cannibalise the main brand, a promise made continually by Qantas managers, is right in your face on the Sydney-Melbourne Cityflyer route, often going to Tullamarine instead of Avalon, which is where Qantas ordered it to fly originally so that anyone trying to avoid paying Cityflyer fares could be suitably punished with an extra 40 kilometres on the road  just to schlep to and from what is a great airport for Geelong.

What happened? Well, Tiger started flying even cheaper fares between Tullamarine and Sydney. And there was a GFC, and travel policy Nazis, those company travel policy managers, who took away the lolly jar when it came to flying Qantas and all those big fares that earned so many frequent flyer points, insisting you flew at the cheapest fare of the day.

In short, life as many sky warrior masters of the universe used to know it, ended.

As it has in America and Europe with the rise of similar low-cost brands to Jetstar. The companies that generated around 80% of the trips flown between major cities have all changed their previously indulgent attitudes to flying to what American Express earlier this week called the “new normal”. The new normal is cheaper and tougher. You fly to company rules, or else.

Jetstar makes most of the money for Qantas shareholders these days. Ryanair makes more money on intra-European routes than British Airways, Lufthansa or Air France. This is the ‘new normal’ too.

Only last week Air New Zealand killed off  business class to Wellington and Christchurch, because only one in eight business class seats were being sold.

Today’s Qantas figures show that on domestic routes, if measured by RPKs or the number of passengers times the number of kilometres flown, Jetstar is still only 39.37% the size of Qantas domestic. It reflects the resistance of business so far to cramming executives into the jet age equivalent of a chicken battery egg farm on the longer transcontinental routes to Perth.

But the Jetstar juggernaut flies on remorselessly. With Virgin Blue undercutting what’s left of the shrinking Qantas full-service product from one direction, and Tiger gnawing away at Jetstar from the ankles up, the writing is definitely on the wall for suits flying on costly fares.