Nothing off table for non-stop flights: Qantas CEO Alan Joyce

Qantas is contemplating exercise areas and large sleeping berths in the cargo hold on future non-stop long haul flights from Australia.

Alan Joyce aboard Qantas' first direct flight between Perth and London. Picture: Stewart Allen.

How about an in-flight exercise area? Or a sleep berth in the aeroplane belly?

Qantas has revealed that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to the considerations on configuring the aircraft that would fly non-stop from Australia’s east coast to London or New York.

In a speech in London, Qantas boss Alan Joyce said “Project Sunrise” — the carrier’s challenge to Airbus and Boeing to extend their range of their next generation aircraft to allow the direct flights by 2022 — had prompted it to contemplate “out there ideas”.

He said that work which the Charles Perkins Centre was doing with Qantas, where passengers were wearing medical-grade wearable devices to finesse strategies that would help reduce jet lag on the non-stop Perth-London service, would help inform what should happen on the proposed super-long hauls by 2022.

“We also are looking at, do we need and should we have four classes?” Mr Joyce said in his speech in London.

“Is there a new class that’s needed on the aircraft?

“Could some of the freight areas that we may not use be used as an exercise area? Could they be used as berths for people to sleep in?

“What are the out there ideas that could apply … for the future?

“And nothing, nothing is off the table.”

The plan for Project Sunrise is to be able to fly non-stop from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne to cities as far-flung as New York, Paris, London, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro by 2022.

Aircraft manufacturers have talked about concepts like in-flight gyms and on-board shops before when working on big passenger planes. But the ideas never took off.

However, the aircraft that meets the Project Sunrise goals will face a potential juggling act: between the distance it can fly and how much weight it could carry, as bellyhold cargo that generates revenues for instance. So Qantas is thinking about how some of the space could be used.

Mr Joyce said while Qantas had flown a “queen of the skies” Boeing 747 non-stop from London to Sydney in 1989, it had no passengers and no seats.

“The challenge for Airbus and Boeing is to do it with full passenger load and full freight load,” he said. “Now that has its challenges.”

Work was being done with Airbus and Boeing “to tweak the aircraft if necessary to get it to do that range”

“They are getting closer all the time,” Mr Joyce said.

But he said the aircraft needed to also be able to be deployed on shorter routes such as Sydney to Hong Kong, so “it can’t be too heavy, it can’t be specialised too much so that it’s not usable elsewhere.

“That’s a big challenge”

* Annabel Hepworth travelled to London as a guest of Qantas