From the CEO

With 50 million passengers boarding our flights annually, there’s a lot going on at Qantas. That’s what makes aviation so exciting.

It also means it’s not necessarily easy to take a step back and think about the long term. But looking 20, 30 years and further into the future has always been part of the job in the airline business.

In the 1930s, Qantas’s co-founder, Hudson Fysh, wrote about the potential of highspeed aircraft being built by American manufacturer Boeing; that was when Qantas was still operating British-made biplanes. A quarter of a century later, Qantas became the first airline outside the United States to fly the revolutionary Boeing 707. Fysh signed off on that order and also lived to see the 747 jumbo jet enter service in the 1970s.

At the end of the 1990s, Qantas CEO James Strong started looking into ordering the Airbus A380. The dozen A380s we eventually ordered arrived between 2008 and 2011, and they’ll still be great aircraft for us well into the 2020s.

Like Fysh and Strong, those of us who work at Qantas today spend a lot of time thinking about what comes next. We know air travel is going to continue growing fast; according to the International Air Transport Association, the number of annual passengers will almost double by 2035 to 7.2 billion. What will flying be like then? The majority of travellers will be flying within the Asia-Pacific region – more than Europe and North America combined. About 50 per cent of Qantas’s network is dedicated to Asia and that will only grow.

We’re also going to see routes between cities that can’t be connected today. From next year, Qantas will fly the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner nonstop from Perth to London. And we’re already talking to Airbus and Boeing about subsequent generations of aircraft that could do Sydney to London or Sydney to New York in one hop. Inflight connectivity will progress in leaps and bounds, too. We’re currently testing wi-fi for our domestic fleet; thanks to new technology, it’s 10 times faster than the industry standard. Over time, it will be extended to our international and regional fleets.

There will also be blue-sky ideas that nobody has thought of yet. Airbus has a division in Silicon Valley focused on finding the next big thing. Here in Australia, we’ve invited startups to work with us on innovations in service and technology.

Aviation has come a long way since Fysh predicted that Boeing was destined for great things. What’s exciting is, there’s so much more ahead – and I have no doubt Qantas will lead the way.