Traffic

Ahead of VH-OQB’s planned return to service in March next year, the aircraft has been brought home in order to begin necessary preparations to get the aircraft and staff trained and ready for flight. Qantas said VHOQB saw extensive maintenance checks after being stored, before the aircraft was ferried to Dresden in August for a landing gear upgrade.

VH-OQB, msn 015, was first ferried to LAX on 26 March 2020.

COVID restarts

Monday, 1 November marked Qantas’ first commercial, long-haul flight since the start of the COVID pandemic. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, VHZNI, nicknamed Kookaburra, took off from Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport at 6:46pm on 1 November, before completing its four-hour leg to Darwin. The flight, performing the airline’s flagship flight QF1, landed at Darwin at 9:18pm where passengers then enjoyed a short 1.5-hour layover in the Northern Territory capital, before the aircraft once again took off at 11:07pm. It finally landed at 6:33am local time on 2 November.

The first quarantine-free flights also landed in Sydney on 1 November. The very first was Singapore Airlines flight SQ221 from Singapore. The Airbus A350, 9V-SHV, departed Singapore at 7:14pm on 31 October, and landed at Sydney nearly an hour ahead of schedule at 5:21am the next day. SQ221 was followed shortly by Qantas flight QF12 from Los Angeles, which landed at 6:04am. The inaugural Qantas quarantine-free international flight was performed by VH-ZND, a Boeing 787-9.

COVID repatriations

Qantas completed its longest-ever repatriation flight connecting Buenos Aires to Darwin, which touched down on 6 October after 17 hours and 25 minutes in the air. The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, VH-ZNH, took off from the Argentinian capital at 12:44pm local time on 5 October as QF14, and travelled entirely in daylight for the entire near-18-hour trip. The flight crossed in Australian airspace at 5:28pm AEDT on Wednesday and landed in Darwin at 6:39pm local time, after skirting the edge of Antarctica on its way from Argentina. The Qantas 787-9 Dreamliner travelled a total distance of 15,020 kilometres, making the trip 522 kilometres further than the airline’s longest regularly scheduled passenger service from London to Perth, and one of Qantas’ longest ever flights. The arrival of QF14 also marks the first time that Darwin has welcomed nonstop flights from every inhabited continent.

Cobham

Cobham has completed its final British Aerospace 146 flight in Western Australia, ending nearly four decades of operations in the state. The final flight, a FIFO flight for Minara Resources, touched down in Perth from Murrin Murrin at around 8:05pm on 4 November. NJY has since been deployed to South Australia, where Cobham has consolidated its BAe146/RJ100 operations. Instead, Cobham will operate its fleet of Embraer E190 and De Havilland Q400 aircraft to service the WA FIFO and resources sector.

Meanwhile, Cobham welcomed its third Embraer E190 to its fleet in October. Cobham first announced its fleet renewal program, which included the return of E190s to its fleet in 2019 as it expanded its work in the fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) market.