When Qantas CEO Alan Joyce spoke at the Amazon Innovation Day in Sydney yesterday some BIG news was revealed: The Flying Roo is on track to select an aircraft for its direct Sydney to London route this year.
We’ve known for a while now that Qantas has been working on this long haul project (AKA Project Sunrise) but how long the project would take to come to fruition was another question altogether.
According to media present at yesterday’s talk, Alan Joyce believes there is now an aircraft that is capable of flying the 21-hour journey.
Alan Joyce hopes that he will be in a position to choose that plane by the end of the year.
He would not confirm what kind of aircraft but we know Qantas has been considering ultra-long-range versions of the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 777 for the route.
During his talk, Alan Joyce revealed that he wrote to the CEO of Airbus and the CEO of Boeing to ask them to develop an aircraft for the ultra-long-range route by 2022.
“The reaction of businesses was huge — Airbus said it was a bit like the space race, the race to the moon; that’s how they’re treating it in their organisation.”
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce
The aircraft isn’t the only thing needed to secure the new route. Qantas also needs to make changes to pilot contracts because, at present, they can’t fly for 21 hours in a day.
Part of the planning for the world’s longest route has also included the development of flight-planning software, known as Constellation, which Qantas developed together with The Sydney of University.
The software considers up to hundreds of thousands of flight paths against real-time weather data to find the more economical route between the two destinations that the plane is flying.
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