Rex never appears on the ABM departures board
Regional Express (Rex) does not fly to or from Northern Peninsula Airport (ABM), and current ABM schedules only show Skytrans (IATA: QN) for regular passenger services. If you see people comparing Skytrans with Rex in Cape York trip reports, they are talking about service quality on other Australian regional routes, not about flights that actually operate from Bamaga.
Across Australia, Rex runs turboprop services on regional sectors like Sydney–Wagga and Melbourne–Mildura, but none of its published route maps or timetables list ABM. When Reddit users say “Rex might be dull but at least they generally run on time,” they are usually comparing on-time performance against carriers such as Skytrans on completely different city pairs, so that quote does not reflect any real Rex operation at Northern Peninsula Airport.
ABM’s live departures, as tracked on sites like FlightsFrom for airport code ABM, show Skytrans as the only scheduled operator, typically linking Bamaga with Cairns (CNS). There are no Rex flight numbers, no ZL designator, and no Rex-branded check-in desks at the small terminal, so you cannot book a through-ticket that includes ABM on Rex metal.
If your broader itinerary elsewhere in Australia includes both ABM and a Rex-served city such as Sydney (SYD) or Adelaide (ADL), you will be on different tickets and different airlines. A common pattern is a Skytrans segment between ABM and Cairns, then a separate booking from Cairns or another hub on a major carrier; Rex may handle some of those down-south legs, but it will be entirely separate from the Cape York portion.
The practical move: when planning Northern Peninsula trips, filter search results by airport code ABM and airline code QN, and ignore Rex in this context so you don’t waste time trying to line up connections with flights that simply do not operate to Bamaga.