In the 1940s, it took a Qantas flight more than four days to fly from Australia to London, with seven stops. A Qantas jet can now cover the same journey in 17 hours and 20 minutes, flying nonstop for the first time.
Numbered QF9, the first flight on the new route between Perth, a port city in Western Australia, and London’s Heathrow Airport, took off on Saturday, March 24. It is scheduled to land in London early Sunday morning. “This is the flight that Qantas has essentially waited most of its 98 years to take,” said Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce.
The passengers – including VIPs and journalists along for the inaugural journey – flew 14,498km, the third-longest commercial route any airline flies. It is also the farthest distance flown by any Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner jet, beating the current record holder flying between San Francisco and Singapore by about an hour. Planes flying the new daily Qantas route will start in San Francisco and fly to Sydney. They will make stops in Melbourne and Perth and continue to London. From the British capital they will execute the same route in reverse.
The flight uses a 236-seat Boeing Dreamliner, a wide body jet with a pair of GEnx engines developed by GE Aviation. Boeing designed large sections of the from light carbon fiber composites, and the same material GE used to design the fan blades and the case for the jet engines. The design, computer systems, and engines together make the plane’s fuel consumption 20 percent lower compared to planes of similar size. That can save Qantas and its airline peers up to $1.6 million per plane per year in fuel expenses, says Max York, CEO of GE Australia.
Top and above: The Dreamliner flying the Perth-to-London route is named Emily after Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the indigenous Australian artist Utopia community in the Northern Territory. The plane’s livery was inspired by her artwork. Images credit: Qantas.
It’s the engines, in part, that made the Perth-to-London flight possible.
“Today’s GEnx, which is built on a pedigree of simple, durable, reliable along with technologies in advanced cooling, coating, materials, produces an engine that has industry leading reliability metrics and lasts a long time,” says James Leister, the project manager for the 787 GEnx engine, who is based at GE Aviation’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.
What makes the engines powerful enough to complete this flight is a list of technical breakthroughs that includes the carbon fiber fan blades, a powerful compressor that can squeeze air with a 23:1 pressure ratio, and an advanced combustor that helps improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. The thrust, reliability, and durability of the engines allow Qantas to fly both ultra-long-haul legs and short hops on the same route, Leister says: “Normally, on a 350-seat airplane, you fly long distance all the time.”
Qantas ordered its first GEnx engine for its Dreamliner fleet in 2007, 20 years after buying its first GE engine for Boeing 767s.
While in the air, the Qantas flight is under watchful eyes of engineers and fleet support specialists based in London and Melbourne. The plane and its engines will also send petabytes of data to operations centers in Shanghai, Dubai, and Cincinnati for analysis. Last year Qantas pilots started using an app developed by GE and the carrier that “provides pilots with flight data in a very visual way, allowing them to see first-hand the amount of fuel used at different stages of a flight and how they can help to reduce carbon emissions,” according to Captain Mike Galvin, head of fleet operations at Qantas.
Qantas sees the flight as the next step in a long history. At the launch ceremony on March 24, Joyce recalled that Qantas co-founder Hudson Fysh in 1931 said, “By 2031 … one may be seated in a bullet-shaped vehicle awaiting departure on a trip to London, occupying a little over half a day.”
Said Joyce: “It seems we are 13 years ahead of schedule.”