Qantas will revisit plans to offer ultra-long-haul flights from the east coast of Australia to markets such as London and New York by the end of this year with an eye toward launching the flights in 2024, the airline’s CEO, Alan Joyce, revealed during one of a series of Eurocontrol “Straight Talk” interviews on Tuesday. Known as Project Sunrise, the plan originally called for a launch in early 2023 of flights between Sydney and London with Airbus A350-1000s. The airline had just gotten ready to place an order for the aircraft before the Covid crisis took hold last spring.
In late 2019 Qantas chose the A350-1000 over the proposed Boeing 777-8X for the missions and indicated it would likely need 12 airplanes. Plans called for Airbus to add another fuel tank and slightly increase the A350-1000’s maximum takeoff weight to give it the required range.
The airline performed three test flights between Sydney and New York/London using a Boeing 787, collecting nearly 60 hours of “Sunrise flying” experience and thousands of data points on crew and passenger well-being. The research flights underscored the importance of dedicated space for stretching and movement for economy passengers in particular, as well as the potential benefits from redesigning the service onboard to actively shift people to their destination time zone.
“We were taking it unbelievably seriously,” said Joyce. “We were literally weeks away from ordering the aircraft. We had done the deal with Airbus, the aircraft was capable of doing it…and we had done a deal with our pilots; 86 percent voted in favor of a new enterprise agreement. So we were planning to order the aircraft and introduce it in 2023.”
Tense negotiations between Qantas and the union representing its pilots, AIPA, centered on so-called productivity and efficiency gains, including the ability to use the same pilots across the A350 Sunrise fleet and the airline’s existing Airbus A330s, in return for 3 percent annual pay increases and promotion opportunities.
“The economics before Covid-19 were very strong,” said Joyce. “Perth-London was the most profitable route on our international network and had the highest customer satisfaction in our network, believe it or not, on the longest route.”
Joyce noted the special position in which Qantas sits for making the economies of scale work for such long-haul flying. “It is a unique opportunity for Qantas because Australia is so far away from everywhere,” said Joyce. “We could apply a fleet with a significant [number] of aircraft that makes it economic, whereas if you’re a BA or a Lufthansa, probably the only place you need the aircraft for is Australia.”
Qantas’s plans call for flights from the three major cities on the east coast of Australia—Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane—to destinations including London; Frankfurt, Germany; Paris; New York; Chicago; Rio de Janeiro; and Cape Town, South Africa.