In the 1940s, it took a Qantas flight more than four days and seven stops to fly from Australia to London. A Qantas jet can now cover the same distance in 17 hours and 20 minutes, flying nonstop for the first time.
The first flight on the new route between Perth, a port city in Western Australia, and London’s Heathrow Airport, took off on Saturday, March 24 and it is scheduled to land in London early Sunday morning. Numbered QF9, it is also the only direct flight between Australia and Europe. “This is the flight that Qantas has essentially waited most of its 98 years to take,” said Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce.
The 236-seat Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jet is powered by a pair of GEnx engines developed by GE Aviation. Qantas named it Emily after the indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Its livery was inspired by her artwork.
The passengers aboard for the inaugural journey include VIPs and journalists. They will cover 14,498 kilometers — more than 9,000 miles — the third-longest commercial flight by any airline. It is also the farthest distance flown by any Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jet, beating the current record connecting San Francisco and Singapore by about an hour.
Boeing designed large sections of the plane from light carbon fiber composites, the same material GE used to design the fan blades and the case for the jet engines. The design, computer systems, and engines together make the plane’s fuel consumption 20 percent lower compared to planes of similar size. That can save Qantas and its airline peers up to $1.6 million per plane per year in fuel expenses, says Max York, CEO of GE Australia.
Top and above: The Dreamliner flying the Perth-to-London route is named Emily after the indigenous Australian artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye. The plane’s livery was inspired by her artwork. Images credit: Qantas.
Planes flying the new daily Qantas route will start in San Francisco and fly to Sydney. They will make stops in Melbourne and Perth and continue to London. From the British capital they will execute the same route in reverse.
Qantas ordered its first GEnx engine for its Dreamliner fleet in 2007, 20 years after buying its first GE engine for Boeing 767s.
While in the air, the Qantas flight will be under watchful eyes of engineers and fleet support specialists based in London and Melbourne. The plane and its engines will also send petabytes of data to operations centers in Shanghai, Dubai, and Cincinnati for analysis. Last year Qantas pilots started using an app developed by GE and the carrier that “provides pilots with flight data in a very visual way, allowing them to see first-hand the amount of fuel used at different stages of a flight and how they can help to reduce carbon emissions,” according to Captain Mike Galvin, head of fleet operations at Qantas.
Qantas sees the flight as the next step in a long history. At the launch ceremony on March 24, Joyce recalled that Qantas co-founder Hudson Fysh in 1931 said, “By 2031 … one may be seated in a bullet-shaped vehicle awaiting departure on a trip to London, occupying a little over half a day.”
Said Joyce: “It seems we are 13 years ahead of schedule.”
A GEnx engine at GE Aviation’s jet engine testing facility in Peebles, Ohio. Image credit: Tomas Kellner for GE Reports.