Project Sunrise

Why do double the work when you could just churn out more of the same thing? I'm sure they have spent many, many, many, many, many days, weeks, months, years doing the math on is it more expensive to put the XLR wing on all the 320s, or is it just better to keep churning out two different ones? And here we have our answer.

We also have an answer to another question that we already had the answer to because, I mean, where else were they gonna go? Qantas has officially announced that its second Project Sunrise flight will go to, drum roll, Jason.

Uh, Chicago.

Ugh.

Sure.

Uh, okay.

I am just excited for the Project Sunrise media and press releases and hype to just be over, and for them to just do the thing, and people either decide they're gonna do it or not do it, and that's it.

We never have to hear about it again.

Story number four today, Qantas has announced it will launch non-stop flights from Sydney to New York from the middle of 2028.

Cutting more than three hours from the current journey, the route will be the second under Qantas' Project Sunrise program.

following the direct Sydney to London flight starting in October next year.

The tickets for New York will go on sale in August of 2027.

If you're doing a radical transformation, there's a story there on Qantas and getting a business that was, the board asked us at one stage to close down Qantas International or look at closing it down.

And how do you change an iconic business like that so it's highly competitive? If you're after a business that's after, you know, the leading edge of technology change, then the whole project about Project Sunrise, how we came up with that idea, which is the project to fly nonstop from Sydney and Melbourne to London, or nonstop from Sydney and Melbourne to New York, which is the moonshot of the aviation industry.

And that was an innovation that we led.

And it tells the story of how you create an innovation like that.

Sorry, before COVID.

Before COVID, we were at a record high in customer satisfaction, a record high in employee engagement, a record high in share price.

And we were buying, we were doing projects like Project Sunrise.

We were investing in new aircraft.

It's making $2.5 billion a year.

And it has things like Project Sunrise coming along.

which was really my initiative to fly direct from Sydney and Melbourne to London non-stop.

Nowhere in an airline in the world is going to do it.

There was a frustration, particularly in 2020, because in 2019, I was planning to leave around the 100th anniversary of Qantas, which was 2020.

In 2019, the year before COVID, Qantas had a record share price, record customer service engagement, record employee engagement.

It was just about to put the order in for Project Sunrise.

It was on the height of its powers.

It's not a game that is made by Bungie.

It's the Operation, was it Sunrise, I think? I know what they're referring to.

What else is

it?

Here's some other articles.

And I could talk about that stuff some too, because it kind of goes along.

I didn't mean for it to go along with this, but these were just, for some reason, this whole Project Sunrise thing has more misleading titles than anything else I've seen.

Here's another one.

exactly

they then talked about their fleet renewal and their outlook for the for the coming years so they received 17 new aircraft during the year including airbus a3 turnout xlr's and a220s they announced that the first project sunrise a350 is scheduled to arrive in april 2027 And I guess the biggest news of fleet is they're moving forward the retirement of the A380 from 2032 to calendar year 2028.

That was quite controversial, particularly to a lot of avgeeks who hold that aircraft very closely to their heart.

Christos, you have quite a bit to say about them moving the A380 retirement forward.

You know what I mean? And so, you know, it's maybe as the pay's going up, the things that you can now afford change or can now no longer afford change depending which direction you're going.

And maybe the air travel is a party to some of the beneficiaries of that.

Yeah, and looking to the future of Qantas, I think the big headline is Project Sunrise, the 351,000, that aircraft being able to fly from the east coast of Australia to the east coast of the US to the western continent of Europe in one hit.

That is going to be fantastic.