Qantas dreams of super long-haul flights

Qantas’s plan for non-stop flights from the east coast to London and New York is an “incredible challenge”, admits Boeing.

Qantas will soon get its 787-9 Dreamliner.

Qantas’s call for aircraft that can go non-stop from Australia’s eastern seaboard to London and New York is an “incredible challenge”, a senior executive at US giant Boeing has said, as the carrier flagged the prospect of added routes to the US from Brisbane.

“That’s an incredible challenge and we are excited about it ... it’s going to be a challenge, it’s not easy,” Jim Freitas, Boeing commercial airplanes managing director of product marketing and analysis said in a briefing at Boeing’s Everett site in Seattle, ahead of Qantas getting its first 787-9 Dreamliner.

He said Boeing believed it had planes that could make super-long-haul distances today, “but it’s just with how many passengers, at what weight assumptions, how much cargo”.

Mr Freitas said the question was whether the “capability of the aeroplane today meet the requirements that Qantas ask or do we have to add something else to it to be able to make that happen”.

The Dreamliner will allow Qantas to fly the first non-stop service between Australia and Europe when it starts flying direct from Perth to London in March, which will take about 17 hours.

Qantas also flagged that its Dreamliner fleet could be doing Brisbane to New York via Los Angeles, while also talking up additional routes to the US from Queensland.

Qantas International chief executive Gareth Evans said the Dreamliner was a “game-changer” and would open the possibility of non-stop city pairs such as Perth to Paris or Brisbane to Chicago. The Melbourne-Los Angeles route will be the first Dreamliner route, followed by Perth to London, taking up the flying time of the first four 787s that Qantas gets. The remaining four 787s that Qantas receives will be in Brisbane, with routes still to be announced.

The new Business Class suites on the Qantas Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Photo: Supplied

In what it has codenamed “Project Sunrise”, Qantas has pushed the giant aeroplane makers, Boeing and Europe’s Airbus, to stretch the maximum flight distance of planes that are being developed so they can make super-long-haul distances. For the ultra long-haul route, the choice would be the Boeing 777X or Airbus A350ULR.

Mr Freitas added that Boeing was excited about the project.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the idea had been likened to the space race.

“We are really close to getting the technology that will allow us to operate routes that we could have only imagined back” in the early days of the Kangaroo Route, Mr Joyce said.

Eventually, he said, “we’d love to be able to fly direct to Brazil, into Rio, and we’d love to be able to fly direct into Cape Town” from the Australia’s eastern capitals.

He said that both Boeing and Airbus had indicated they were up for the challenge.

“The actual head of Airbus said, ‘it’s a bit like the space race to me, it’s a bit like getting to the moon’,” Mr Joyce said.

The direct flight from Sydney to London is expected to take about 20 hours and 20 minutes, while going non-stop from Sydney to New York is expected to take 18 hours and seven minutes.

* Annabel Hepworth travelled to Seattle as a guest of Qantas.