Qantas plays long game
LIKE any youngster, nothing puts a grin on the face of Taronga Zoo’s new baby elephant Jai Dee quite like splashing around in the pool.
The 13-week-old spends his days hanging out with mum Pak Boon, 7-year-old sister Tutka and aunt Tang Mo, exploring the enclosure and mucking around in the water.
“His favourite thing to do is swim, and you can tell he has a great time playing in the water,” supervisor Gabriel Virgona said.
“He spends most of his time hanging out with the older females, they all take turns in looking after him,” Mr Virgona said.
“He’s a handful, he loves to jump in between them all.” QANTAS has challenged Boeing and Airbus to build an aircraft that can fly from Sydney to London non-stop within five years.
The 17,000km ultra longhaul flight cuts about four hours travel time and will help Australians breach what Qan- tas chief executive Alan Joyce says is one of the last barriers in transport.
“This is a last frontier in global aviation, the antidote to the tyranny of distance, and a revolution for air travel in Australia,” he said yesterday.
Mr Joyce said Qantas was planning to have the Sydneyto-London route operational by 2022, along with a Melbourne-to-New York flight and Brisbane-to-Paris route.
He said Qantas’ engineers and flight operations experts would work with Boeing and Airbus to help design the planes to make sure they have the capability to fly for more than 20 hours non-stop.
“Once we know that the air- craft has the technical ability … we will then go through a normal request for approval process and make sure the pricing and the economics work for it,” Mr Joyce said.
Mr Joyce also said the airline is investing in new airport lounges, in-flight Wi-Fi systems and cabin upgrades, while including increasing the num- ber of premium economy seats in Airbus A380s.
“Our investment in free inflight Wi-Fi will ramp up from September, as we finish what has been a successful trial and move to an accelerated rollout to our domestic A330s and 737s,” Mr Joyce said.