But Qantas can minimise the environmental damage by restricting baggage (or charging a fortune for it) and
by limiting choice of meals and drinks: flying lots of food and booze halfway around the world just in case
someone prefers a shiraz to a cabernet sauvignon is expensive business.
Won’t passengers expect the height of luxury?
Qantas will aim to deliver wellbeing, so instead of red wine or white wine passengers will be encouraged to
drink “organic kombucha by Remedy, a live cultured, sparkling drink full of natural probiotics that assist
with digestion”.
You can also expect a “hot chocolate bedtime drink with the combination of warm milk and chocolate
containing the sleep-inducing amino acid Tryptophan to help prompt the body’s sleep cycle”.
But however well you sleep onboard, there’s nothing Qantas can do about the 10-hour time difference –
leaving London at lunchtime, you’ll arrive in Sydney at teatime but it will feel like breakfast time. And
coming back, you’ll take off around 9pm, arrive at 6am but it will be late afternoon in Australia. It will
deliver the ultimate in jetlag.
So who will be onboard?
Ultra-long-haul flights rely on a significant number of business travellers being prepared to pay a premium
for the speed and ease of a nonstop trip.
Some leisure passengers who visit family in Australia frequently and have no interest in a stopover will also
pay over the odds for the privilege – and they may be filling the premium economy cabin. Travellers with
mobility issues, for whom the airport is an especially tough experience, will also be attracted to it.
During the first year of the Heathrow-Perth link, which opened in March 2018, Qantas had an average “load
factor“ of 94 per cent, meaning that only 14 seats are empty on a typical flight. The load factor is on a par
with budget airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair, and way ahead of the airline’s system-wide average of
filling four out of five seats.
Who won’t be onboard?
Budget travellers – it will be a premium product, though depending on loads, Qantas may occasionally offer
discount flights to fill seats to people heading to other Australian cities – or onwards to New Zealand. But
otherwise it will have little appeal to anyone who needs to change planes to reach their final destination.
There are relatively few major British airports – Belfast, Bristol and Inverness – without a one-stop
possibility to Australia at the moment. For most of us, there are a range of connecting possibilities at
attractive fares. And while in the opposite direction a few people will be connecting to Tasmania, again
Melbourne, Brisbane, etc, are all accessible with one stop.
Will British Airways or Virgin Atlantic do the same?
No. The view is that London-Sydney is a very limited market with absurd competition. Virgin Atlantic has
abandoned the route, and for British Airways the token daily service is just a shadow of the multiple Boeing
747s that used to depart every day to all corners of Australia. Indeed once the Qantas nonstop is flying, you
might see BA abandoning Australia altogether; the Sydney link is an outlier to the standard out-and-back
pattern.
Were either British Airways or Virgin Atlantic to launch a new ultra-long-haul route, I reckon it could be to
Honolulu.