FLASHBACK

Queensland, 1929.

If the name Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services doesn’t ring a bell, its acronym will: Qantas. Founded by two Gallipoli veterans in 1920 as a mail and passenger service for some of Australia’s most remote communities, the world’s third-oldest airline has evolved by leaps and bounds since its first flight in an Avro 504K biplane (soon replaced by a pair of de Havilland DH-61 Giant Moths, one of which is pictured above delivering airmail for the first time to Brisbane) took off across the Queensland outback. Nicknamed the Flying Kangaroo, the Australian flag carrier has racked up numerous industry firsts over the decades: in 1958, it became the first airline to offer round-the-world services via both hemispheres; in 1974, it set a world record for passenger load with the evacuation of 673 people aboard a Boeing 747 from cyclone-hit Darwin. Qantas takes credit for inventing the inflatable airplane escape slide and coining the term “business class.” In 1989, another of its 747s achieved a nonstop distance record for a commercial aircraft by flying more than 17,000 kilometers between London and Sydney; and just last October, a Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner completed the longest commercial flight to date from New York to Sydney. But perhaps the Flying Kangaroo’s greatest achievement is its safety record. Though the line uttered by Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character, Raymond, in Rain Man—“Qantas never crashed”—is not entirely accurate, the airline hasn’t had a fatal accident since 1951, when a de Havilland Drover went down off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Yet not a single passenger has been lost in the jet age, making Qantas, now a century old, the safest airline in the world.