Virgin Australia's proposed partnership with fly in-fly out and charter operator Alliance Aviation Services could help both airlines win contracts during a difficult time in the resources industry, says Virgin regional boss Merren McArthur.
"When we are competing for business we can choose which is the most cost-effective operation to draw it from and pitch the most likely solution," she said of the arrangement.
"We have got very complementary businesses. Their strength is predominantly on the east coast and in South Australia. Our strength is obviously in Western Australia and they have also got operations in Western Australia." 
Her comments came ahead of the release of Virgin's quarterly financial results on Monday. The market is expecting weak figures after Qantas this month said business had been softer than expected over that period.
Virgin last month secured a $425 million loan from its major shareholders to give it more time to fix its ailing balance sheet. Shortly afterward, Air New Zealand said it would seek to sell all or part of its 25.9 per cent stake in the Australian carrier.
Virgin and Alliance announced plans for a partnership in   February but they are still working on the final details to be submitted to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for approval.
Ms McArthur said they would keep their existing charter contracts to themselves but work together on bidding for new contracts. They will also co-operate in the event of disruptions for mechanical and other issues.
The charter market is highly competitive as a result of the downturn in the resources industry. Rival operator Cobham last week unveiled plans for a &pound;500 million ($960 million) capital raising to avoid breaching debt covenants that was attributed in part to a slowdown in the Australian FIFO market. Cobham in mid-  February lost a major contract with oil company Santos to Alliance.
Ms McArthur said Virgin had been restructuring its regional and charter fleet in response to the resources downturn. It has decommissioned its fleet of eight Fokker 50 aircraft and placed them up for sale. 
"One of the aspects of [the resources downturn] was the demand for smaller aircraft types dropped off," she said. "Clients were upgauging to bigger aircraft [to cut costs]. One of our clients upgraded all of their flights to F100s."
The loss of the F50 fleet placed 120 jobs at risk, but ended in less than 10 involuntary redundancies because Virgin didn't replace staff who left due to normal attrition and was able to redeploy others, including pilots.
Virgin's regional arm has also lost operational control over the airline's fleet of ATR72 turboprop aircraft based on the east coast as part of an 18-month project to transfer them to Virgin's mainline division which was completed in   December. 
"They are really more aligned with the Virgin Australia mainline business," Ms McArthur said. "One, they are co-located. It is also high frequency [regular passenger transport] services and it just fits more naturally there. From Virgin's point of view it enables the mainline business to control all of the RPT operations over here in the one spot."
Ms McArthur said for the remaining charter fleet, Virgin was placing a major focus on reliability because if there was a mechanical issue at a remote mine site with no parts on hand, it caused major problems for clients.
"We have restructured our rosters so we focus on just reactive maintenance during the week and preventative maintenance on the weekend when we've got more time to do it," she said.