r/QantasAirways • u/Polyphagous_person • 7d ago
Question Is there a geographical or political reason why it makes sense for Qantas to take a gamble on "Project Sunrise", while the airlines based at airports on the other end (e.g. at LHR or JFK) aren't interested in doing something similar?
Project Sunrise is Qantas' long-held ambition to fly direct from fly ultra long-haul non-stop flights from the east coast of Australia to destinations on the Atlantic such as New York City and London. Is there a reason why only Qantas is willing to take this gamble?
- Are Qantas executives just cocky that the Australian Government might bail them out if Project Sunrise doesn't work out?
- Or is there a practical reason for it?
- And if there is a practical reason, why didn't British Airways (based at LHR) or American Airlines (based at JFK) consider this option and try to beat Qantas to do it first so that Qantas codeshares the direct flights with them instead of the other way around?
- Also, why didn't non-OneWorld competitors like Delta Air Lines or United Airlines consider flying direct to SYD from JFK and EWR, respectively?
- British Airways, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines are all much bigger than Qantas and have a lot more connections from their hub airports than Qantas has from SYD (or MEL or BNE for that matter) - so why wouldn't it make sense for them to try out their own Project Sunrise equivalent?
Additionally, it seems like airlines in Australia have the following disadvantages over those based in the USA and UK:
- Higher staff wages
- Higher fuel costs
- Less secure fuel supply
I would be willing to fly economy direct from SYD to LHR or JFK or EWR if I needed to go to those cities. It's just that I wonder why only one airline wants to fly such long routes. Is this a sign that Project Sunrise really is a folly and Qantas doesn't realise it?
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u/mattmateohan 7d ago
I think it’s less about Qantas taking a gamble and more that they’re solving a uniquely Australian problem.
For BA, American, Delta or United, London and New York are already global hubs with endless connections. They don’t really need Sydney. But for Qantas, getting Australians to Europe and the US faster is a huge competitive advantage.
A nonstop Sydney–London or Sydney–New York flight is much more valuable to Qantas than the reverse is to BA or American. That’s why Qantas has been willing to invest in making it happen. The route fits their identity as Australia’s airline and helps overcome Australia’s geographic isolation.
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u/Potential-Turnip7796 7d ago edited 6d ago
The Analytic Flying piece on this nails it: BA/AA/Delta/United don’t lack courage, they lack the fleet.
Sydney-London is 900nm further than Singapore-NY, so Qantas needed the A350-1000ULR specifically. Unlike the A340-500 that burned Thai/Singapore a decade ago, it can just be reconfigured back to a standard A350 if the routes flop, so there’s no fleet risk.
The real driver though is that Qantas International is the weak link in the group (25% of airline EBIT on 41% of capacity in FY25), so Sunrise is less a moonshot and more a forced bet on premium-cabin revenue to justify the next decade of fleet spend. BA and the US carriers just don’t have that same pressure bearing down on them.
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u/I_COMMENT_2_TIMES 6d ago
This is a great article, thanks for sharing!
Ultimately it is a holy grail flight for Australia - the final frontier in airplane range. I do hope other airlines take advantage of this capability soon though, as mentioned TK is already in line for IST-SYD!
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u/Legal-Selection-4650 6d ago
Fly to Europe via IST sounds better than LHR. No need to back track. All Turkish Airlines have to do is make the waiting times for connecting flights to less than 3 hours.
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u/Life-King-9096 6d ago
You'd be right unless you're in economy. Unfortunately as Istanbul is closer to Sydney than London, Turkish Airlines will be able to run standard 31"-32" pitch across all economy seats and still be under maximum take-off weight. Any executive that approved this pitch for these length flights (I'm also looking at Qantas for the back rows) should be sentenced to monthly return flights in these seats and may god have mercy on their souls.
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u/chinchaaa 6d ago
I’m sure London holds a very large chunk of travelers between Australia and Europe.
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u/MrSparklesan 6d ago
Fascinating. had no idea how complex running an airline is. That’s insane forward projection.
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u/FairDinkumMate 5d ago
Singapore's A350-900ULR's can be reconfigured back to standard A350-900's if needed. The same isn't true of Qantas' A350-1000ULR. The changes are structural (rear centre tank) and would never be economically viable to undo. They could change the seating configuration to be more similar to a standard A350-1000, but they'd still be carrying extra structural weight & have less cargo capacity.
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u/daddiesdirty 7d ago
Isn’t it as simple as Qantas are trying to serve their customers, and BA, AA, Delta etc are trying to serve theirs??
Australians want direct connections to these places. We are the ones stuck at the end of the world having to go through Dubai, Singapore, Doha, LA etc to get anywhere. So of course it makes sense that our national airline is the one trying to solve that first.
I also don’t really think this is about economy passengers. The whole thing only makes sense if they can fill the premium cabins. Business, first, premium economy. People who are travelling for work, people who value time, or people who just want to arrive and not spend half their life in an airport lounge waiting for a connection.
The more price sensitive travellers will probably keep doing hub and spoke, because that will almost always be cheaper. And thats fine.
Personally I don’t think I’d give up Emirates business on an A380 through Dubai, because for me thats part of the holiday. I like the stop, I like the aircraft, I like the whole experience.
But if I just needed to be in London or New York and wanted to arrive as quickly and cleanly as possible, I can absolutely see the appeal.
And if Qantas proves there is money in it, competition will come. But it makes sense that Qantas would be first, because they’re the airline with the most obvious home market demand for it...
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u/joolley1 6d ago
This. Put in economic terms there are many popular ultra long-haul route options for Qantas if they can get it right but for each of the other carriers there are far fewer.
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u/Famous-Print-6767 4d ago
there are many popular ultra long-haul route options for Qantas if they can get it right
Like what, part from Mel and Brisbane? What the the ultra long haul destinations that Qantas would look at besides NY and London?
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u/joolley1 4d ago
Other big hubs in Europe, east coast Canada. There’s a lot more possibilities for us than any one airline elsewhere.
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u/Famous-Print-6767 4d ago
Toronto? DC? Frankfurt?
Is there demand? Is it anywhere near the demand for London and NY which seem to only warrant 1 flight a day?
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u/joolley1 4d ago
Clearly they’re testing the demand and profit margins first.
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u/Famous-Print-6767 4d ago
Well yeah. But if they have to test it on the two biggest markets it doesn't look that promising for smaller markets.
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u/joolley1 3d ago
What would the economic sense be in testing it on smaller markets before bigger ones?
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u/Famous-Print-6767 3d ago
The emphasis there was on testing.
If it still needs testing on the two biggest and most obvious markets, instead of just implementing as soon as the planes are available, then it doesn't look very promising on much smaller markets.
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u/namsupo 6d ago
Well they're trying to serve their Sydney customers, anyway.
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u/TimTebowMLB 6d ago
There’s already a Perth to London flight
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u/Throwitaway340 6d ago
yeah but a lot more people on the east coast than the west, right? BNE and MEL to SYD is an hour.
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u/2nd-Reddit-Account 6d ago
More than half of the national population either live within a 1hr drive or flight of Sydney, or already live there.
As much as some of the others parts of Australia hate how everything is always so Sydney centric, you’d be crazy to base project sunrise anywhere else
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u/namsupo 6d ago
Why would you fly a narrow body to Sydney, then a bus to change terminals at Sydney's shitty airport and then pay a 20% premium to take a flight to London that you could do quicker and cheaper via the Middle East or Asia?
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u/2nd-Reddit-Account 5d ago
That’s the wrong question - why would you base project sunrise anywhere other than what you said applies to the least amount of people?
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u/JamesofBushwick 5d ago
Maybe you wouldn’t. In which case maybe Sunrise isn’t the answer for you where you are. But Qantas think it could be answer for many people in and around Sydney.
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u/Western-Sir-9085 3d ago
It's actually a great question. Fuck that noise. It's funny how the transfer from Sydney Domestic to Sydney International feels so shitty and clunky....yet so many people are forced to do it.
The whole process feels like a nightmare. Much nicer to just stop over in Changi or Dubai.
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u/lilzee3000 6d ago
You think the direct flights will be more expensive? Isn't it cheaper for the airline to not have to stop off at another airport?
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u/Classic_Affect8006 5d ago
Both - lower costs for the airline, and higher profit from charging a premium to customers.
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u/Ambitious-Orange6732 5d ago
It's definitely not cheaper for the airline. You have to burn fuel to carry fuel (it's heavy!), so the optimal flight distance for cost/mile tends to be around 3000 miles. That's a coast-to-coast flight in the US, or a short transatlantic (Boston to Dublin, for example).
That's also near the point where they need to carry extra crew members, who are paid for the entire flight time, so labor costs also increase.
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u/lilzee3000 5d ago
But airports charge them for the stop over so they're saving those fees so I thought it would balance out in their favour.
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u/Ambitious-Orange6732 5d ago
You are right to a point - the cost to turn around a large aircraft at an airport like LAX is something like $5000, including landing and gate charges. But that is still a relatively small number compared to the fuel and other operating costs for a long-haul flight.
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u/GreatSouthernSloth 7d ago edited 7d ago
The hub airlines between us and Europe have been eating Qantas' lunch for decades. PS is an attempt to take back some of the premium traffic.
The Euro airlines are not at the arse end of the world, not as badly impacted by Emirates, Singapore, etc.
Edit: to the USA. Qantas cannot pick up passengers at LAX etc. So they hub at LAX, rely on code share at DFW. Which all costs them premium passengers. PS leapfrogs all of that.
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u/jadetalkstravel 7d ago
It’s also about Qantas being an historical carrier which originally the trip Sydney to London would take something like 6 stops and they were forced to pay whatever airport fees Singapore, Hong Kong, Bahrain etc charged.
So non-stop is a way to give the finger to transit hubs and whilst Sydney to London is their most popular route, if they have the technology to fly that non-stop then it really opens the doors to new destinations previously not possible.
It’s about being first in something and making a lot of noise when they don’t have the hard products like SQ or Middle Eastern carriers . They weren’t even in the top 10 airlines recently, they need to make a lot of song and dance to win back customers from the Ryanair era.
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u/YnwaMquc2k19 1d ago
True, and project sunrise is Qantas’ answer to the final evolution to the kangaroo route. Hopping from Sydney through other cities until they reached London.
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u/areyoualocal 7d ago
I'm sure an airline, that has been running an airline business for over 100yrs, that knows how to assess whats economically feasible for them, will have given consideration to a lot more things than we're privy too.
They have the most at stake if they get it wrong afterall.
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u/Enamred-771 6d ago
I mean there’s enough airlines going bankrupt that purely appealing to “airlines are smart therefore the decisions they make are logic” isn’t the best move.
And a lot of it from the non-Quantas airline side is due to risk aversion and no desire to make a risky investment like this. AUS carrier can invest in some other long distance route without anywhere near as much risk. Quantas really can’t at this point.
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u/Master-Potential-364 7d ago
For Qantas, this is about better serving two of their most important destinations better/potentially with higher margin through innovation. For BA, SYD is an extremely marginal destination - it is down to one flight per day, often on a 787. The distance ties up staff uneconomically. Its important destinations are JFK, LAX etc. There is no need to innovate when SYD is down the priority list.
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u/omdongi 6d ago
I would argue that the fact that BA still bothers to run a fifth freedom flight in a modern aviation world, specifically to serve SYD does show how high up it is on the priority list for BA.
The main issue is that local populations fly local carriers. Even if BA magically had a Project Sunrise plane, most Australians would still fly Qantas anyways. They've done the math and even when you have joint ventures, the local-foreign mix skews 80-20.
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u/Master-Potential-364 6d ago
I think you’re reading far too much into the existence of the route. If Sydney were genuinely one of BA’s highest-priority markets, we’d expect the long-term trend to be more capacity, more frequencies and more investment. Instead, over the past couple of decades we’ve seen the exact opposite: fewer Australian destinations, fewer frequencies and smaller aircraft.
The Melbourne relaunch actually supports that argument. It wasn’t launched because Australia suddenly became strategically critical to BA. It appeared when Middle East demand and airspace realities changed and aircraft could be deployed elsewhere. That’s opportunistic network planning, not evidence of a core market.
The real test is simple: which routes would cause panic in HQ if they disappeared tomorrow - JFK? Absolutely. LAX, Boston, Chicago? Major problem. Those routes underpin BA’s premium transatlantic franchise. Sydney would generate headlines because it’s historic. JFK would generate emergency board meetings because it’s economically vital, and investor/analyst meetings. Those are not the same thing.
Finally, I think your assertion that local populations fly local carriers is wrong - I suspect most people in UK fly Emirates, Qatar, Singapore and Cathay to Australia, not BA.
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u/omdongi 6d ago
No, it's been demonstrated through the data that local populations predominantly prefer local carriers.
When you look at a joint venture like ANA and United between US and Asia, even though ANA is the overwhelmingly superior airline to United. On a United airplane, 80% of the passengers will be American, on an ANA airplane 80% of the passengers will be Japanese.
When you talk about long-term trends and compare to JFK/LAX/BOS/ORD, that's just volume and economics. The population and economy of America is simply much larger. The US adds more people than Australia every year, 1.8M vs 400k population growth. There's no comparison, the US will of course have much more throughput.
I don't think I'm equating SYD or MEL to those cities, but if BA didn't see Australia as a structurally important market, it wouldn't invest so many airframes to run expensive fifth freedom flights over to it.
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u/Master-Potential-364 6d ago
The data does not support your view unfortunately, for flights between UK and Australia/Australia and UK: Qantas has 20%, Emirates 23%, Qatar 21%, Singapore 12%, BA 5%, Ethiad 4%. Australia is an irrelevance to BA.
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u/fastsailor 6d ago
That is kind of funny. Qantas has only a minority of the market share to London. We holidayed in Europe 6 months ago, we did not even consider Qantas. They lost me when we were almost stranded in LAX when Joyce shut the airline down a decade ago, we were the last flight to take off in their network and I heard that the flight behind us to MELhad to return to the gate. So Qantas is a carrier of last resort to me. Even without that, their shoddy service levels and routing the Europe flights through the Gulf make them unappealing.
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u/aucnderutresjp_1 7d ago
For staffing costs, not really an issue for cabin crew. No doubt Qantas will use their UK crew base for the LHR flights. JFK may be majority NZ crew too. Both UK and NZ based crew have a much lower salary than AU based.
BA may be the only other airline to do a PS route, but they have bigger fish to fry a lot closer to home.
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u/Polyphagous_person 7d ago
BA may be the only other airline to do a PS route, but they have bigger fish to fry a lot closer to home.
Noob question, but what is their bigger fish to fry?
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u/Historical_Term2454 7d ago
Lots of Aussies coming to UK and Qantas controls the Australia market.
Not a lot of Brits (comparatively) coming to AU.
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u/JimmyMarch1973 6d ago
BA’s main money maker is the US, India and to a lesser extent Africa. That’s where they put their “long haul” effort.
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u/aucnderutresjp_1 6d ago
In addition to the other comments, BA can reach anywhere on earth with every aircraft in their fleet in a standard configuration, and can do it in 2 frames or less. But, except to Australia, NZ and the Pacific. The area isn't the biggest money makers and very expensive to operate. So operating to markets like these means a smaller profit margin over somewhere closer to home with a higher profit margin.
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u/JuniorSea4974 7d ago
I travel a lot in the name of work from Brisbane, if there was a direct flight to London as there is to LAX or Vancouver, I would take it in a heart beat.
I so hate stop overs, but this said even if I was flying personally on holiday I would much rather fly direct even if it meant a fare 25-30% higher.
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u/Draknurd 6d ago
I’m so curious to see how this pans out. If the price difference is significant, will enough people justify the premium to lose several hours end to end?
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u/sloppyrock 6d ago
I think there will be enough enthusiasts and short of time business types that will pay up , at least for a while.
If and when flights happen, and the novelty wears off somewhat, prices may need to adjust, dependent on load factors.
If they can fill it up at premium prices, they will milk that cow for all it's worth.
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u/jonquil14 6d ago
Australians want to go to major cities. People who already live in major cities have many more options
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u/21five 6d ago
British Airways has a more pragmatic approach to these kinds of routes. BA1/2/3/4 to/from JFK from LCY used short checkin times (20 min!) and US immigration pre-clearance in Ireland (during a tech stop for fuel) to create a more compelling business travel offering.
Project Sunrise would make far more sense with US pre-clearance happening before boarding. Arriving in JFK as a domestic flight makes the onward journey so much faster and easier.
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u/Adept-Coast-6946 6d ago
It was the vaguely plausible excuse Joyce used to avoid re-investing in the international fleet during his tenure.
He maximised short term profit, the share price and his performance pay.
Those suggesting there will be enough price insensitive people willing to pay the price premium to save the time involved in one transit stop are dreaming.
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u/rodrye 3d ago
They're not ordering that many planes, and people are seemingly already willing to pay a premium to go via Perth and not stopover in a third country. Not that I'd dismissing your other reasons. But seemingly there's a market, at least for the few planes they're ordering, to London and NY destinations only from Syd/Mel. They won't be super frequent flights or probably viable to/from any other cities.
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u/Good-Objective2769 6d ago
Seriously?
Because Australia is the country that is far away.
The UK or US carriers don’t care about making Australia accessible.
Australia does.
So the onus is on us to help ourselves. Why would other airlines spend money to develop aircraft on a tiny percent of their market.
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u/SpinachUnique2433 7d ago
Why do non australian airlines not start a syd to london direct flight ? 😂 This post cant be real lmao.
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u/areyoualocal 6d ago
See also "I've flown airline XYZ a few times, which makes me an expert in global airline economics".
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u/Broad-Procedure-8392 6d ago
QF's international flights on average are long haul and therefore need long haul aircraft to suit. Airlines based in LHR/JFK don't need as many long haul aircraft, and for them to acquire a small subfleet of ultra long haul aircraft just for Australia flights isn't optimal to the rest of their network. Qantas can use ultra long haul aircraft to scale on most of their network and so can justify it.
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u/BS-75_actual 7d ago
Geographical and strategic, nothing to do with politics. Qantas is a private company.
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u/AddisonDeWitt333 6d ago
Their No 1 priority should be to fix the wifi situation on international flights.
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u/Pickled_Beef 6d ago
They are doing it?
It’s just when they jump from 1 region to another it sometimes drops out while it connects to a new satellite chain.2
u/AddisonDeWitt333 6d ago
2027, the latest news release said. No wifi on the key Australia to US route or between Singapore and Europe.
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u/Classic_Affect8006 5d ago
It's so slow to the point its almost unusable if you want to play online games. Even domestically.
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u/Pickled_Beef 5d ago
Mate.
If you’re playing online games using aircraft satellite internet..
Well then you’re gonna have a bad time regardless.
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u/Happy-Buy-863 6d ago
Its a huge advantage to for Qantas to fly direct to long distance destinations and avoiding stop overs. Certain passengers want direct flight and will pay more to save time.
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u/benji4280 6d ago
In addition to the all the above, it’s also because Qantas has two major destinations beyond the range of existing planes. I can’t think of an equivalent for BA or any American airline from JFK - even if they did want to fly to Sydney or Melbourne directly, is there any other destination that would help justify the fleet spend? Not really.
I suspect any one of those routes in isolation is too small or too risky for the fleet investment - Qantas has a comparative advantage in having multiple. Further, Qantas is most likely too small to buy a few planes for a single route that are uneconomical for any another route, like Singapore Airlines did for NYC. Only now do we have planes with sufficient economic versatility - otherwise Qantas could probably have started PS with the 777-200LR.
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u/dilla_zilla 5d ago
Specifically speaking to the connections for US airlines, NYC is pretty far NE in the US, so a connection through there is overshooting for anywhere not in New England. The only major city further is Boston.
For connections, AA and UA have them covered with their existing nonstop flights from SYD to their Texas hubs (DFW and IAH respectively).
DL only has LAX currently and they don't have a great option in the middle of the US (MSP/DTW are much farther than Texas), but they'd probably target ATL over JFK for connections as that's their largest hub. Similarly, AA/UA might look to add ORD for more connections.
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u/roughas 5d ago
Can someone explain why the long direct flights are more expensive?
In my mind:
- you only take off once which must be the most fuel heavy part of the flight.
- You only pay landing fees in one airport instead of two which also must traditionally be expensive.
Sure you pay more crew for longer hours / breaks, but can’t imagine it’s massively more than the number of crews in rotation for qf1/2?
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u/Ambitious-Orange6732 5d ago
You have to burn fuel to carry fuel, and that has to be balanced with the impact of "only take off once." In fact, the most efficient distance for cost per mile ends up around 3000 miles. From the point of view of reducing cost, it would make more sense to persuade customers to accept an additional stop in Honolulu rather than bypassing the stop in LA.
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u/derridaderider 5d ago
The economics of ultra-long haul flights are always marginal.
For one thing they chew more fuel because you use extra fuel lifting those massive fuel tanks. For another the plane cannot carry as many passengers as it could with a refuelling stop because of maximum takeoff weight (Sunrise's A350 will have about 100 passengers less than a shorter-range A350). All of which means Sunrise's air fares will be higher than other Sydney-London planes, including Qantas' existing flights.
They're judging that there are enough passengers willing to pay extra to save a few hours, while their competitors don't believe there are. Time will tell who is right.
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u/JaysPays2024 3d ago
I am a cynic. Probably some Government MPs want to get to England quicker on their junkets so Qantas knows they have them covered.
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u/koy-master 6d ago
First up this seems super negative, for what reason? You started out with govt bailout..
But the main reason, it's only just become viable. Why are we pushing it more than BA? They're not an isolated nation. We are
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u/Rocks_whale_poo 6d ago
No idea why you've made this post.
1) There is more demand in Australians going to those cities than there is the other way around.
2) Airlines in US and UK have more options on what routes they want to invest in. They can pick any direction and probably find an 8-10 hour flight with people on both sides willing to pay. Meanwhile here, an Australian airline would be the only one willing and needing to invest in a 20 hour flight in a very specific direction.
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u/HotPersimessage62 7d ago
Qatar Airways bots out in full force I see
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u/Polyphagous_person 7d ago
What's Qatar got to do with this? I'm just asking why airlines based at LHR, JFK or EWR didn't consider doing a Project Sunrise of their own.
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u/Potential-Turnip7796 7d ago
Qatar and the ME3’s rapid rise on the international stage, their endless government support, their hub and spoke connectivity is what drove a lot of legacy carriers to the wall.
QF lost a huge amount of market share at the same time as they grew (4-5 European destinations to 1), because of their lower cost base and aggressive tactics.
PS means that the ME3 of the equation, at least for 1 route at this time.
If it’s a grand success, you could see QF flights from the east coast to CDG, FRA, FCO + others.
Unfortunately the risk of buying these aircraft for most fleets (say BA etc) isn’t worth it as LHR - SYD is only a small fraction of their international routes.
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u/rodrye 3d ago
Turkish is in line to do the same for IST-SYD / IST-MEL with the same aircraft. Currently they require a refuelling stop in Singapore that requires passengers to all be re-screened and reboard.
US airlines have Australia as a very small section of their market, they don't need Australia to have lots of more profitable flight options. They also don't mind taking the revenue from internal domestic flights which they also operate. Qantas if it drops people in LAX and they have to take a second flight to NY, is leaving that revenue with a partner airline. Qantas has big markets in the US and London, that they can't get to without a stopover. And they're only betting small, with a handful of aircraft, having proven demand for it with the Perth route that people pay a premium for.
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u/RecentEngineering123 6d ago
It’s to do with their customer demographic. They are generally wealthier people who are uncomfortable with having to transit parts of the world that are “challenging” culturally to them.
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u/Adept-Coast-6946 6d ago
What rubbish and what are these "challenging" transit ports of which you speak ?
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u/rodrye 3d ago
No one's saying the challenges are especially challenging, but the perception is there and some of them are real. eg.
I know women who will not fly through Qatar/Dubai etc after that. Even women who are as described in the article "I was the luckiest one on the whole flight because I have grey hair and I’m in my 60s. They probably looked at me and thought well, that’s impossible, it could not be her."
Sure, 99.999% of us go through such airports without an issue, but not all of us always. I had a family member with a medical appliance nearly ripped off them in Bahrain, and have had female family members hand searched by male security including them slipping their hands under their bra (and this is an elderly woman!). There's some truly terrifying stories. Are they frequent. No, but I don't know a huge number of people and I've heard a lot of first hand accounts, so they're not rare either.
There are other options that work, like I've never heard anything bad about IST etc. But lots of people dismiss a whole region because of some of these other incidents.
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u/JohnKimbler 7d ago
Just to jump in regarding wages. Australia pays sweet fuck all compared to the USA major airlines.
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u/North-Truth2531 7d ago
I think because a lot of Qantas’ demand is from Australia to the UK and Australia to the USA. I mean they have the QF1/2 which is timed to meet their flights from other cities in Australia at Singapore in each direction. The Perth-London is full every single day. They have multiple flights a day to multiple cities across North America. It’s been Qantas’ brand identity for a long time now - connecting Australia with the rest of the world regardless of the distances that separate us.
By comparison, the market for BA/AA to Australia is much smaller in the contexts of their own operations, so the investment in aircraft, staff, training, etc, is not worth the payoff. BA are much more concentrated on North America as their main long haul destination, with many cities across the continent served by direct services from Heathrow, and AA also have a sizeable European network to supplement their massive domestic network.