How a maiden flight heralds a new era in aviation and will change our travel habits forever
DON’T dream it’s over — how technology is heralding in a new era of aviation and air travel to maker it more shorter, faster and cheaper for all.
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AS he crawled into the rear cavity of Charles Kingsford Smith’s ‘Southern Cross’ Fokker TriMotor monoplane, Len Taylor pondered — not for the first time — about the advancement of flight and whether one day ordinary kids like him would ever fly non-stop to London.
The then 10-year-old Taylor would act as test flight human ballast for the famed aviator as well as equally revered aviation pioneer Bert Hinkler, as secondary to his regular job of chasing the horses off the then grass runway of 1920s and ‘30s Sydney Airport.
“They were always trying to be the first and fly somewhere non-stop but you just couldn’t back then,” an 86-year-old Taylor told News Corp Australia in 1998, as he recalled the excitement over Kingsford Smith’s eventual 10.5 day record flight from Australia to London.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes in aircraft … in the 1970s when the first Jumbo (Boeing 747) arrived I was standing right here and I thought then it wouldn’t be long before people would do that (London) in one hop, maybe by 2000.”
It would be another 20 years but this weekend (March 24, 2018) the maiden non-stop passenger flight from Australia to UK will herald a new era in commercial air travel.
With great fanfare, Qantas’ Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner will fly from Perth to London — the first direct airlink Australia has ever had with Europe with technology advancement making it possible and economically viable.
Flying marathon distances has been done before; on August 17, 1989, Qantas took delivery of its first 747-400 on a record-breaking non-stop flight of the City of Canberra from London to Sydney with five pilots, two cabin crew and 16 passengers on-board in a stripped out configuration (for lighter weight) to make the 20 hours nine minute flight.
But the difference is this weekend’s QF9 non-stopper will be the first flight in history with a full manifest of 236 passengers to make that 14,400km run, in a record 17.2 hours, with technology including a carbon-fibre reinforced polymer hull allowing for greater comfort and 20 per cent greater fuel efficiency. It won’t be Australia’s longest flight, that title going to Sydney-Houston at 17 hours and 30 minutes and that’s still only the fourth longest ultra-haul trips in the world. But the Dreamliner will usher a new era and end an old one with the retirement of the airline’s much-loved 747s.
When the Concorde ceased supersonic flights in 2003 so too it seemed was the almost space-race appetite for new technology, but aero giants Boeing and Airbus particularly are reinvigorating long-haul travel.
This record breaking flight to the Old Dart will not only become the second longest haul in the world at 14,498kms — after Qatar Airways Auckland-Doha run of 14,525kms — but signals ever growing interest in narrowing tyrannies of distance and cost and not just for Australian travellers although as a consequence of geography we remain a benchmark challenge.
Airbus is already now looking to be the first out of the hangar with non-stop flights between Australia’s east coast and London, with its A350-1000 variant answering the challenge by Qantas in its dubbed “Project Sunrise” to fly the revered Sydney-London 17000km ‘Kangaroo Route’ by 2022.
Which harks back to the days of the Smith brothers and November 1919 when then Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes recognised the importance and potential of aviation to a nation like ours and offered a 10,000 pound purse for the first Australians to fly England to Australia. Pilot brothers Capt Ross Smith and Lt Keith Smith along with mechanic sergeants Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett completed the winning epic multi-stop flight in their Vickers Vimy in 27 days and 20 hours. The “Air Race” stirred the public’s imagination that with changeover pilots the journey could be cut to less than a week and carry paying passengers although it would be another quarter of a century before such a service was offered.
But that’s not to say the romance with flying has ever died and indeed continues to make the world a little smaller with every new aviation exploration. Regular services flew to Australia from 1934 but involved more than 30 stops and took at least 10 days. It cost the equivalent of two years of minimum wage so was very much the exclusive of the rich and would only carry up to 15 passengers. By 1954 a tourist or economy class was introduced and the flight made in pressurized Lockheed Constellations with flying times reduced to 54 hours and with the advent of the Jumbo and the powerful 747-400 one-stop and cheaper flights became standard.
Len Taylor was never much for flying ironically despite his bit-part in the history of Australian aviation but if he was around he’d no doubt be cheering the quest for record firsts to continue.
Originally published as How a maiden flight heralds a new era in aviation and will change our travel habits forever
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