Qantas Airways plans to begin offering the first nonstop commercial flight ever between New York and Sydney, Australia, by mid-2028, the airline said on Tuesday. The trip will take about 18 hours.
The flight will be the second route in Qantas’s Project Sunrise initiative, which will use the world’s longest-range aircraft for direct flights between Australia and the rest of the world. Qantas had previously announced that nonstop service between Sydney and London would begin in October 2027.
Flight time from Sydney to London will be about 22 hours, which will make it the most lengthy commercial passenger service. Currently, Singapore Airlines operates the longest nonstop service, which requires about 19 hours to fly from New York to Singapore.
Flying nonstop will shave about three hours off Qantas’s fastest current travel time between New York and Sydney, and about four hours off between Sydney and London, the carrier said.
Vanessa Hudson, Qantas’s chief executive, said in an interview that there was a growing number of Qantas customers who wanted to fly nonstop on ultra-long-haul routes.
“They don’t want to stop in the midpoint, and they are prepared to pay a premium to do that,” she said, adding that the airline’s existing service between London and Perth, a city on Australia’s western coast, is its best “commercially performing route.”
Qantas flies nonstop from London to Perth, but is temporarily making a stop in Singapore on flights from Perth to London because of the conflict in the Middle East, an airline spokeswoman said.
Project Sunrise will use Airbus A350-1000ULR jets, which have been developed for Qantas. The jets, which have a roughly 5,280-gallon fuel tank, can fly up to 22 hours, Airbus said in a news release. Qantas said it had ordered 12 of the planes, with the first one to be delivered in April. Ms. Hudson said she anticipated that it could take more than two and a half years for the entire fleet to be delivered.
A test aircraft in July completed a nonstop 24-hour flight from Melbourne to Toulouse, France, a world record for the longest distance flown by a commercial airliner. In 2019, Qantas made its first nonstop flight from New York to Sydney, a 19-hour journey in a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner with 49 passengers and crew, in order to test how ultra-long-haul flying affects the body.
The new Airbus jets will have 238 seats and four cabins: first, business, premium economy, and economy. Premium seating will take up about 40 percent of the plane. Ms. Hudson attributed that decision to rising demand for premium travel and the realities of aircraft weight constraints.
Tickets for the two routes will go on sale next year, Qantas said. Passengers will be able to buy seats for the Sydney-London route starting in February and for the Sydney-New York route in August. Prices are not yet available, but Ms. Hudson said the airline was considering charging a 20 percent premium above current one-stop services.
When Qantas first announced Project Sunrise in 2017, it said it planned to include service from Melbourne as well as Sydney. Ms. Hudson reiterated that Melbourne was still a priority, but is further down the line.
“The Project Sunrise aircraft will absolutely operate out of Melbourne,” she said, adding that the airline will announce new routes “progressively” as the new jets arrive.
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