From the CEO
A little over a year ago, Qantas embarked on one of the most ambitious projects in our long history: a non-stop flight from Australia to Europe. Many said it wouldn’t work; they were convinced that people didn’t want to sit on an aircraf for 17 hours. We thought that if we could design the flight differently, customers would value the convenience of a direct flight. And now the results are in. The flight averages more than 90 per cent full and we were pleased to learn that our longest flight also has the highest customer approval rating on our network.
Perhaps you’re flying on it right now. You may have noticed the little differences, like the yoga classes on offer in our Perth International Transit Lounge or the inflight entertainment that we constantly update with the most binge-worthy content. (If you’re sitting in seat 56H, you have big shoes to fill – our data shows that its occupants rack up more hours of film and TV viewing than any other on the aircraf.) Passengers on the journey have enjoyed 42,000 Tim Tams and 367,000 glasses of wine since flights began and the record flight time between London and Perth is 15 hours and 15 minutes.
Qantas is changing long-haul travel – and this route is just the beginning. We’re taking what we’ve learned and applying it to the design of our next big project. We challenged Airbus and Boeing to build us an aircraf that’s capable of flying non-stop from the east coast of Australia to London and New York and teams within Qantas are busy working on the technical and financial elements to make these services viable. We call this challenge Project Sunrise so named for one of our long-haul flights during the 1940s – a service that took off in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and flew over the ocean for more than 30 hours straight. Upon their arrival in Perth, the three passengers in that tiny seaplane received a certificate – The Rare and Secret Order of the Double Sunrise – because they literally experienced two mornings while in the air.
Plenty has changed since then but what hasn’t is our determination to continually reinvent what it means to travel comfortably and safely over vast distances. Qantas has to think harder and fly further than everyone else in aviation to overcome the tyranny of distance. That’s precisely how a modest airmail operation in outback Australia went on to become one of the best airlines in the world.
Whether your journey with us today is routine or record-breaking, thank you for choosing Qantas.