Travellers to save as Qantas pushes new planes into super long-haul

Savings from Qantas potentially going super long-haul from eastern capitals to New York would be passed on to travellers.

Savings from Qantas potentially going super long-haul from Australia’s eastern capitals to cities such as New York would be passed on to travellers in ticket prices, the carrier’s chief executive, Alan Joyce, has said.

Mr Joyce has ambitions of non-stop flights from the eastern seaboard to New York and London by 2022 and has challenged the airline manufacturing giants to stretch the distance that planes being developed can go.

“We have seen technology be passed on to consumers, and with the advent of this aircraft I think that’s going to be the trend,” Mr Joyce said.

Having to do a stopover on longer journeys, such as to New York, bumped up costs, he said.

“So the ability for us to continue to offer lower airfares is ­absolutely there with this new technology,” he said.

He said history had shown that as aircraft became more ­advanced, prices fell. “One of the great stats is when we first started flying the Kangaroo Route, the average airfare between Australia and the UK was 122 weeks of an average person’s salary,” he said.

But he said the Boeing 707, which Qantas first took delivery of in 1959, had changed the economics of flying and ticket prices were dramatically lower by that time, while they had fallen significantly again by 2008 when Qantas got the Airbus A380.

Mr Joyce made the comments in Seattle, where he will take delivery of the first Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner this week, which will allow non-stop flights from Perth to London.

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, plus additional routes to the US from Queensland.

Qantas International CEO 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.

Melbourne-Los Angeles will be the first Dreamliner route, followed by Perth-London, taking up the flying time of the first four 787s Qantas receives. The remaining four will be based in Brisbane, with routes still to be announced.

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 Joyce was downbeat on the idea of Qantas using supersonic jets any time soon.

“We would have been very keen to have supersonic aircraft. There is a trade-off though … between supersonic aircraft and distance as the aircraft have to burn a lot of fuel. The problem when Boeing looked at doing this in the 1960s are problems that haven’t been overcome.”

Annabel Hepworth travelled to Seattle as a guest of Qantas