YOU can’t accuse Tony Fernandes, the Asian airline entrepreneur, of being short of ideas. “How about a porn channel on the inflight entertainment? I’ve always thought we could make a lot of money out of that,” he says with a cackle.

Fernandes, a former pupil of Epsom College, Surrey, is Malaysia’s answer to Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Michael O’Leary, with an added dash of Sir Richard Branson, for whom he used to work.

Fernandes set up Air Asia in Kuala Lumpur six years ago. It is Asia’s biggest budget carrier and operates in the style of Easyjet and Ryanair, offering cheap short-haul flights by eliminating frills and working planes hard. Its 75 aircraft serve 80 destinations.

Now Fernandes is coming back to Britain with a new venture, Air Asia X, in which Branson is a significant investor, holding a 20% stake.

Air Asia X is a long-haul, low-cost airline that Fernandes claims will offer return flights from Britain to Australia for about £350, roughly half the going rate. Flights will start in March next year, departing from Stansted probably — Fernandes says he is still in talks with a number of rival airports.

It’s not a great time to launch an airline (see below). Oil is at $125 a barrel and climbing, and a gaggle of weaker airlines — Eos, Maxjet, Frontier and Skyjet — have gone to the wall in recent months.

Oasis, a Hong Kong airline that tried something similar to Air Asia X, offering long-haul, low-cost services to London, ran out of cash last month after only 18 months of operations.

Fernandes is undaunted. “I gave Oasis two years, and I turned out to be six months too generous,” he said. “Oasis was in between low-cost and full-service — in no-man’s land.

“We will be properly low-cost. That might mean leaving or turning up at 2 am and going an hour later if that gets the best use out of the aircraft, and going to smaller airports if the big ones won’t give us the deal we want.”

But the main difference is the bulwark provided by Air Asia, which also owns 20% (Fernandes himself will control 40%). It should provide a ready-made stream of passengers to feed its sister company. It flies 22m passengers a year, “a captive market”, in Fernandes’s view.

Air Asia X already has six months of operations under its belt, flying from Kuala Lumpur to Australia’s Gold Coast.

It uses an Airbus A330 with 386 seats, compared with the 330 the same aircraft might have if flying for a full-service airline. The plane is called Semangat Sir Freddie — the Spirit of Sir Freddie, in memory of the late Sir Freddie Laker, who pioneered low-cost, long-haul flying in the 1970s with his Skytrain service.