Alerts Sign-up
Qantas will likely use a North Pole route to achieve its Project Sunrise Sydney to London nonstop with the A350-1000, set for delivery in 2026. In an exclusive media round table ahead of the launch flight from Perth to Paris, Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson stated that the operations team has been “flying the route” daily for the past year and found that often the North Pole route was quickest.
“It’s been fascinating to see all of the different routes that we would take from Sydney [or Melbourne & Brisbane] to London. Some of those routes are north, over the North Pole rather than west over Europe. Lots of planning goes in, particularly for these long flights to ensure we get it right, most efficiently, and importantly that we can carry maximum payload. Depending on the season, the winds favour the North Pole route as the quickest,” Ms Hudson said.
“We have this new system called Constellation, which is a flight planning system and tracks all of the winds globally, east, west, north, south. So we put Sydney-London into the simulation and it calculates, based on what we can see today, the best direction to go.”
