Kangaroo hop to Oz
Three meals, 17 hours to watch Crocodile Dundee 10 times, and a VERY numb behind! Could you cope with the new non-stop ...
FOR some travellers, stop-overs on very long flights can provide a welcome opportunity to stretch the legs. For others, they just prolong the misery.
Now Britons heading Down Under have the option of flying direct for the first time – if they are prepared to be cooped up for more than 17 hours.
The maiden flight of a non-stop regular service between Australia and the UK touched down at Heathrow yesterday, before setting off on its return leg at lunchtime.
Qantas 9 (QF9) landed at Terminal 3 at 5.02am, just over 17 hours after setting off from Perth at 7pm local time (11am GMT) on Saturday.
The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, carrying more than 200 passengers and 16 crew, completed the 9,009-mile journey slightly before the scheduled arrival time of 5.10am.
The new link with Perth is around three hours quicker than routes which involve stopping in the Middle East to change planes or refuel. Including the time for boarding, disembarking and taxiing, passengers spent almost 18 hours on the plane.
To minimise the discomfort of such a long flight, the Boeing 7879 Dreamliner has lower air pressure in the cabin and moister, cleaner air to cut the chance of dehydration and headaches.
There were main meal, midflight, morning bakery and breakfast menus, as well as a snack cabinet passengers could access throughout the flight.
Dinner offerings included cheese ravioli with leek and mushroom cream sauce, and chicken with red rice and roasted vegetables.
Wayne Kwong, who travelled in economy and shared photos on social media, wrote: ‘Specially designed meals for this ultra longhaul flight. Tasty, filling but not heavy on your stomach! Well done.’ However fellow economy passenger Peter Robinson, a builder from Liverpool, said the specially crafted food was bland and ‘ordinary’ – but admitted the flight was ‘good, quicker than I thought’.
One journalist on the flight said: ‘While the elimination of the stopover meant I felt much more settled throughout the lengthy trip, by the last hour, the minutes started to really drag – although it was much less draining than the usual two-leg route.’
One man, who said he and his partner fly from Australia every year to visit family in Hampshire, said the trip ‘flew by’. ‘It was amazing, the best flight we ever had, we feel fresh as daisies,’ he told the BBC.
Business class passenger Robert Williamson, a mining executive from Perth, called the flight ‘surprisingly good – above my expectation’.
The route is just under a quarter further than the UK’s existing longest service, operated by Garuda Indonesia between Heathrow and Jakarta (7,275 miles).
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce called the Perth-London service a ‘game-changing route’ and pointed out that the earliest Qantas flights between Australia and the UK – known as the ‘kangaroo route’ – had taken four days and involved seven stops.
Western Australia’s state government is also hoping to see an increase in tourist numbers as a result of the direct route. State premier Mark McGowan was among more than 200 passengers on yesterday’s flight.
According to flight comparison site Skyscanner, direct return flights in mid-June start from £852, compared to £571 for one with a two-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airways
The flight is the world’s secondlongest after Qatar Airways’ route from Doha to Auckland, which spans 9,028 miles, according to the International Air Transport Association.