Welcome to your new magazine

You are more than likely to be one of three customers: a current subscriber to Australian Aviation who received this magazine through the mailbox as part of that subscription, a dedicated retail buyer aware we were launching a new magazine, or a new customer coming across World of Aviation on the newsstand for the first time.

Last month, the team at Aviator Media outlined a change of publishing strategy to our thousands of loyal Australian Aviation readers aimed at expanding our coverage while delivering greater opportunity to solve a problem experienced by “time-poor” customers.

That sees a change in the publishing cycle to deliver Australian Aviation magazine as a bi-monthly, allowing more time for readers to consume it, while bringing to market a new aviation magazine with a wider, more global emphasis.

So here is World of Aviation, a new look, different format, and mainly feature content engaging expert coverage from the US, Europe, Asia and – even closer to home – Australia-based content where it has worldwide implications.

World of Aviation, or WOFA as we have tagged it, is also a bi-monthly, dovetailing with the Australian Aviation print cycle. In other words our dedicated subscribers will still receive a magazine once a month while our retail customers looking for us on the newsstands will have the chance to buy one or other or both.

We hope you like what you see and read – hopefully enough to join our list of subscribers. There are some great deals available covering both magazines and/or their associated digital editions.

A welcome, too, to both new and loyal advertisers who have found over time that Aviator Media product delivers their message to a targeted audience unparalleled in the Asia Pacific. Our developing aim is to deliver new “eyes on” for advertisers by widening the customer base through the potent combination of both magazines covering regional and global issues.

Views are mixed on whether ultra long-haul is genuinely the ideal

So to the cover story in this edition: the battle to deliver the longest commercial point-to-point flight on the planet. Views are mixed on whether ultra long-haul is genuinely the ideal for passenger and flightcrew welfare, but with legs of around 14 hours commonplace, and the world’s longest flight clocking in at around 18, is it much of a leap to 19 hours or even 20 (London-Sydney)?

One of the basics, of course, is the technology, and as this magazine went to press Airbus announced it would offer the A350-1000 to Qantas to achieve its objectives to deliver a new world benchmark under its Project Sunrise initiative.

By the time you read this the airline will have conducted the first of its experimental flights using a limited payload 787-9 between New York and Sydney to gauge the effects of 19-hour ultra long-haul on passengers and crew.

Qantas is scheduled to operate another experimental flight, this time between London and Sydney, in November. Meantime, Singapore Airlines continues to hail the success of its current world-record holding flight between Singapore and Newark at 18 hours 45 minutes.

On the other side of the coin is the belief that supersonic speed is the key to overcoming both distance and passenger resistance to long-haul marathons. The children of Concorde are emerging, as you will find in another of our terrific features inside.

Concorde was way ahead of its time. Now, it seems, time has caught up.

Enjoy!
Concorde set the scene for supersonic passenger flight. Now the time might be right to realise the legacy.