How Qantas flew a 747 non-stop from London to Sydney

In 1989, Qantas secretly gathered its best people to plan and execute an aviation milestone: the first direct flight between London and Sydney. In this exclusive extract from his new book, The Mighty 747, Jim Eames tells the inside story of how they pulled it off.

Australia’s remoteness has always presented challenges to its national airline. Qantas is the oldest airline in the English-speaking world, and it has confronted difficulties of distance that few other airlines have had to face. To survive as an international carrier, it had to stretch the boundaries of long-range air travel to their absolute limits — and it did so long before the advent of the jet age.