Qantas will attempt to fly nonstop from New York to Sydney on Friday, a flight of nearly 20 hours.
As Qantas continues to consider nonstop service from Sydney to London and New York, it still has many kinks to work out. Foremost is the question of which aircraft will be used on the new ultra-longhaul routes. As part of its “Project Sunrise” initiative, both Airbus and Boeing have been challenged to create an aircraft that can handle the mission with a full cargo load.
There are also labor issues (will pilots and flight attendants agree to flight of this length?) and health issues (can the human body handle a 20-hour flight in an economy class seat?) to be determined.
While the aircraft issue remains the biggest unresolved question, Qantas will attempt the route on a Boeing 787-9 this week. Friday’s flight will not be a commercial flight. Instead, it will operate under QF7879 and feature only 50 people onboard, including crew.
Per Bloomberg:
Scientists and medical researchers in the cabin will turn Qantas’s brand-new Boeing Co. Dreamliner into a high-altitude laboratory. They’ll screen the brains of the pilots for alertness, while monitoring the food, sleep and activity of the few dozen passengers…The aim is to see how humans hold up to the ordeal.
Qantas expects to announce concrete plans, including a new aircraft, by the end of the year…or scrap the idea entirely if deemed unfeasible.
CONCLUSION
The idea of traveling from London to Sydney and avoiding Asia or the Middle East is intriguing. The idea of flying from New York to Sydney and avoiding the West Coast is equally intriguing. That Qantas is working on fine-tuning the onboard menu and cabin environment suggests it has no worries that Airbus or Boeing will be able to deliver an adequate aircraft for the mission. JFK-SYD is 9,944 miles while LHR-SYD is 10,569 miles.
> Read More: Qantas Issues Challenge For Nonstop Sydney – London Flight
This is awesome! I hope they’ll be able to do it and someday open it to the public. I always thought Air New Zealand could have done an AKL-EWR nonstop with the same aircraft given how they already fly AKL-ORD and AKL-IAH.
@Joey : second that. i dunno what’s holding up NZ from announcing AKL-NYC and beating Qantas to the punch. Whether it’s EWR or JFK is unclear – while EWR is obviously UA hub, they may not want the connections that could easily be routed over IAH to dilute the yields of such an ultra long route and make the P&L ever harder than it is.
@Matthew : rumor on A.net is that essentially Airbus won already – once the 3 test flights prove successful, A350-1000ULR is basically inevitable
I too understood that the aircraft is now down the the A35K ULR, the A35K rather than the A359 because of payload issues on the 9 and that Boeing were out of the running.
I would hope they would take a page from SQ and configure their aircraft in all PE/J class configuration. And for those passengers that cannot afford that flight can still route through another QF hub such as LAX or DFW in economy.
I think this makes a ton of sense IIRC on of the 18 hours flights that bypassed Singapore it was all business class seats.
Personally I am not sure I would want to fly 20 hours NS even in F suites – not a fan of some of the 15+ hours flights to Asia or down under.
For those who like me were wondering since the article didn’t mention it: JFK-SYD is 9,944 miles and LHR-SYD is 10,569 miles.
Thanks! I added this to the article. It was in my notes and I meant to have this in original article.
You should read the Angus Whitley piece on Bloomberg, reporting on this flight: it seems the 40 passengers , including some journalists, took part in various experiments. It’s a good read ( although I doubt that many really frequent flyers will find it so daunting in J; Y is another matter altogether)