"The shootings and everything that was happening at the time looked like fireworks from the air," Daniel Poonan, the Qantas jumbo's customer service manager, recalls.

It was their second flight to Cairo in two days to evacuate hundreds of Australians. Centred on Tahrir Square, millions of Egyptians were demanding the ousting of then president Hosni Mubarak. The country was a powder keg, and the Australian government was desperate to get its citizens out.

Like many other rescue missions Qantas has made over the years, the flights to Cairo in early 2011 highlighted the broader role Australia's de facto national carrier has played. Once on the ground at Cairo's main airport, the crew set about readying for an influx of passengers as American and Canadian troops guarded the plane.

In the terminal, security guards carrying automatic weapons looked on menacingly.

"They were not there to be friendly," Poonan says. "There was random gunfire. There were government people with weapons; there were rebels with weapons . . . it wasn't a very safe place. We could see a lot of military."

Australians caught up in the turmoil ran a gauntlet from a hotel in central Cairo to the airport to catch the Qantas flight to Frankfurt.

"To be going to Egypt for your dream holiday and then . . . have all these people looting and turning on tourists [meant] a lot were quite traumatised," Poonan recalls.

"Just getting to the airport was a struggle. There were explosions in the streets, gunfire, blockades."

The Qantas jumbo eventually flew out of Cairo bound for Frankfurt carrying a load of scarred passengers, including a Canadian journalist suffering critical injuries after he was stoned. 

Qantas responds in a crisis

Qantas has a long history of evacuating Australians from hotspots around the world, and at home.

In 1974, a Qantas 747 set a world record at the time for the number of people – 673 in total – it carried on a flight out of Darwin in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve.

But with the Abbott government determined to throw open the doors to foreign airlines, the question is whether the country will always be able to call on Qantas in times of crisis.

The aviation industry argues Australia needs to seriously consider the risks of a concerted push to relax limits on the number of flights foreign airlines can fly on routes here.

"We have just about the most liberal market going, and I'm not convinced that is in the total national interest," Australian and International Pilots Association president Nathan Safe says.

"But the government doesn't want to talk about it."

The fear is that a highly skilled industry will be hollowed out. A shrinking of Qantas' international network over the past two decades is often cited as a case in point.

Of course, a similar argument was made about protecting the local car industry.

However, consumers voted with their wallets, opting for cheaper imported cars over those churned out by a local manufacturing industry.

In the same vein, the threat posed to the local aviation industry is a secondary consideration for most consumers who want cheaper fares. They are also lapping up higher levels of service from the likes of Etihad, which has taken luxury to another level with "The Residence" suite on its A380s.

More flights to China

In the wake of a free-trade deal with China, the Abbott government signed a new aviation agreement in January that will triple the capacity on routes between China and Australia over the next three years.

The pace of negotiations will grow over the coming months as senior government bureaucrats meet counterparts from Qatar, Malaysia and Indonesia. Fast-growing Qatar Airways is eager to expand its network to include services to Sydney, and talks to raise the cap on flights between Qatar and Australia are scheduled for as early as May.

A self-declared supporter of so-called "open skies", Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb is spearheading a concerted push to lift restrictions on foreign airlines flying to Australia.

With tourism in his portfolio, Robb says ensuring more flights on routes to Australia is essential to reaching ambitious targets of 6 per cent to 10 per cent annual growth in international tourists over the next five years.

"None of that potential is there unless you can get people on planes," he says. "The UAE, Qatar, they have got big demands. They talk about bringing in . . . many many people in from Europe if they have access."

The opening up of routes to Australia stretches back to 1989 when the Hawke government signalled that aviation policy should be based on putting the nation's interests first, instead of those of Qantas.

Since then, successive governments have opened the door to the extent that Australia has become one of the most liberal aviation markets in the world. The country has an open skies agreement with the US, which gives airlines from both countries unrestricted access to airports, and a single aviation market with New Zealand.

Australia also has bilateral air rights agreements with scores of other countries that allow unrestricted capacity to all international airports apart from the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Capacity on air routes in and out of Australia has soared from about 15 million available seats in 1992 to more than 40 million today.

Airports and tourism bodies have mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign in recent months to open the door further, much to the chagrin of Qantas.

While declaring itself a supporter of "open skies", Qantas argues that a relaxation of the rules has to be a "fair trade in terms of the access that government grants being balanced by what benefits they can secure for Australian carriers in return".

However, Qantas' ability to mount a public campaign is hamstrung because it has hitched itself to Emirates. Its position is in stark contrast to Geoff Dixon's jousting with Emirates when he was Qantas boss last decade.

Qantas and Virgin Australia have both decided that if you can't beat them, join them, and formed deep alliances with foreign airlines that have become integral to their international networks. It is a tacit admission that they cannot compete head-to-head with international behemoths whose cost bases are significantly less.

Indeed, the end of last month marked the two-year anniversary of the launch of Qantas' alliance with Emirates, which management believed has been pivotal to help stem losses on flights to Europe.

Virgin also walks a fine line in any public jousting over access because of its alliances with airlines such as Etihad, Singapore Airlines and Air New Zealand; all of which have cornerstone stakes in the Australian airline.

Australia's second-largest airline has taken a relatively benign stance on the pros and cons of opening the doors. Its position needs to be considered in the context that Virgin has a much smaller international network, so stands to lose less than Qantas from greater competition.

Virgin chief executive John Borghetti says he falls in "the bracket of the more the merrier" when it comes to granting foreign airlines greater access to routes here.

However, his blessing comes with a caveat.

"I agree with the concept but it needs to be traded fairly. You can't just say, 'right, I'll open all my doors and everyone do whatever they want'," he says.

"You can say I'm happy to let more people in but there has to be a reciprocity where it is a balanced trade and that is the critical part."

Devil in the detail

While agreeing philosophically with free-trade agreements, Borghetti emphasises that the "devil is always in the detail and unless you know all the detail, all you do is give a general view".

In recent weeks, a major spat between the Gulf carriers and the three largest US airlines has shone a global spotlight on the impact of rolling out the red carpet to foreign airlines.

In a white paper titled "Restoring Open Skies", Delta, United-Continental and American Airlines have claimed that their rivals from the Persian Gulf have collectively received $US42 billion ($53 billion) in subsidies and "other unfair advantages" in the last decade.

The US airlines argue the subsidies are fuelling a "massive expansion" in the size of the fleets of Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, and "seriously distorting the commercial marketplace".

Delta president Edward Bastian summed up the Americans' argument during a recent visit to Sydney: "This is not about open skies – this is about fair skies."

The big three are lobbying the US government to reduce access to the Gulf carriers, which has prompted Emirates and Etihad to mount a counteroffensive in Washington DC.

For Australia, Andrew Robb makes no bones about the government's position.

"We want seats coming into Australia. If the Arab nations want to subsidise our flying, well, that will be a fact of life and we should take advantage of it, frankly," he says. "My view is that we can't do anything about that."

Robb, tourism operators and airports received a boost from a recent Productivity Commission paper which concluded that giving airlines greater rights to fly to Australia's four major airports will deliver "net benefits" to Australia.

Qantas, on the other hand, was bruised by the econocrats, who knocked back its claim that relaxing the rules will encourage more Australians to fly overseas instead of enticing foreigners to holiday here.

Of course, an unravelling of a tightly regulated industry is under way elsewhere. However, it is at a slower clip to Australia, which allows wholly owned foreign airlines to set up shop in the domestic market.

South-east Asian governments have long targeted this year for a relaxation of the limits on airlines flying on routes within the region. However, the test will be whether all countries that are members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations – or at least the major nations – ratify, sign and implement what is known as "open skies". It promises much, but many within the aviation industry are cautious.

"ASEAN has made good progress," AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes says.

"There is a structure and a form and with the right energy and commitment we will become freer and freer. "[But] the doors won't be flung open."

The Australian and International Pilots Association is pushing for a government-led examination of whether the policy of lifting capacity on international routes is in the national interest.

"We think the government has been very slow in keeping up with this issue," Nathan Safe says.

"Ultimately, our domestic airlines will suffer because other countries seem to place a lot more importance on having their own viable carriers, versus the approach here that competition reigns supreme."

The danger for Australia is that the removal of any remaining barriers also eliminates much-needed leverage in future negotiations for access by our airlines to overseas markets.

However, it appears to be a moot point as the government, airports and the tourism industry favour ways to boost foreign visitors over concerns about the risks to our aviation industry.

For consumers, what could possibly be wrong with cheaper fares?