Already a subscriber?It’s the 22-hour flight that is shaping up as one of Vanessa Hudson’s first big tests. Can the relatively new Qantas chief executive pull off her predecessor’s dream of non-stop travel between Sydney and Melbourne and London?
Qantas’ head of international flying, Cam Wallace, is putting his faith in the airline’s new proprietary flight-path software known as Constellation. The software takes millions of data points and simulates tens of thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of flight paths against weather data to find the best route.
Chris Chamberlin, a news editor at Point Hacks, a platform that lists frequent flyer deals, took a trip to Hamburg to try out the new economy section. He says he was pleasantly surprised. “The challenge with Project Sunrise is finding enough economy passengers who’ll be happy to go up to 20 hours without properly stretching their legs. In my book, when flying long-haul down the back, I’d much rather stop somewhere along the way – Asia or the Middle East on the way to Europe, for instance – to rest up, walk around and prepare for the next stage of the journey,” he adds.“Time will tell whether these non-stop flights are comfortable enough to become the preferred way to fly.
“When they started flying 17 hours from Perth to London, we made that work, we’re doing Auckland to JFK, which is longer. You can keep adding on only half an hour ad infinitum, but at some stage you’re going to reach a point where that doesn’t work,” he says. “We’ll be demonstrating to the regulator that it’s safe and that there isn’t some magical thing that happens at 20 hours that doesn’t happen at 19 hours. We very much believe that there’s not going to be any very significant difference,” says Hosegood.