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Qantas’ routes through hubs like Singapore will not disappear any time soon despite the approach of Project Sunrise, the airline says.
Speaking at a tourism forum in Melbourne, Qantas International CEO Cam Wallace said that direct Project Sunrise flights to New York and London will allow the Flying Kangaroo to turn Australia’s geographical isolation into an advantage, but will not replace its other hub-based services.
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It comes as the first of Qantas’ A350-1000ULR aircraft undergoes ground testing in Toulouse, with the second having entered final assembly in February.
“Qantas is currently embarking on the biggest single re-fleeting in our history. It’s more than 200 aircraft and it’s a massive programme of work that’s absorbing a lot of people in the organisation,” Wallace said.
“The way we think about it is, we’ll have these next generation aircraft which gives us more flexibility, and it really unlocks and changes the tyranny of distance as a disadvantage and swaps it to a structural advantage for us because of where we are geographically located.”
According to Wallace, Project Sunrise will allow Qantas to serve more markets point-to-point, which he says is what its customers “really value, but also what they’re prepared to pay for”, as seen in its customer satisfaction scores.
“So, the likes of Perth-Rome, Perth-Paris, Perth-London, Melbourne-Dallas, Sydney-Dallas, AKL-JFK, all these flights which are 15-hour plus, those are the ones that are successful in the top quartile of what we’re operating at the moment,” he said.
“When we have a fleet which is largely going to be covered with 787s to A350, it means that we can connect the world to any few points on a point-to-point basis.
“It doesn’t mean that hubs will die, hubs will always be complementary, and we’ll still have services over Singapore for example, but it’ll give us real flexibility about building our network and building our strategic hubs in the future.”
The first Qantas A350-1000ULR is slated for delivery in late 2026, ahead of the launch of non-stop flights from the east coast to London and New York in 2027.
The A350-1000ULR forms part of Qantas’ massive fleet renewal program, which is seeing the carrier transition from a mostly-Boeing airline to a largely Airbus one.
Its first services will likely be to New Zealand for training purposes, with Qantas not yet revealing whether London or New York will see the initial ultra-long-haul non-stop flights.
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