Qantas' 20 Hour Flight Strategy - And It Might Just Work

[00:00:00]This is the Airbus A350 1000ULR.

[00:00:04]To the untrained eye, it's just another widebody jet, but this one is different.

[00:00:08]This one was built to do something no aircraft in history has ever done before. To open up a new frontier of aviation.

[00:00:17]>> Just over a year's time, Australian passengers will be able to book the first ever non-stop flight from Sydney to London.

[00:00:23]>> Project Sunrise took a big leap forward today, almost a decade in the making. We learned the inaugural destination. It'll be London.

[00:00:30]>> It's dubbed Project Sunrise. And in 2027, it will take off from Sydney, climb to 40,000 ft, and not touch the ground again until London, 22 hours later. No stops, no hubs. The longest scheduled passenger flight the world has ever seen. I'm Aaron, and this aircraft is the tip of the iceberg in the most audacious bet in modern aviation.

[00:00:53]Because for the entire history of flying, Australia has been trapped by one brutal fact. It sits basically too far from everywhere that matters. Sydney to London, Sydney to New York, you always have to stop somewhere. And whoever owned that stop basically owned the entire route. For 20 years, more often than not, that stop has been in the desert. Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi.

[00:01:19]This plane is Quantis' plan to take it all back. Sort of. And I'm going to explain. And the timing could not be more perfect. You see, most of the coverage you've seen about Project Sunrise treats it as a stunt, a test to human endurance. Could you survive it?

[00:01:35]But that misses the entire point. This is a highly calculated strike at the most powerful business model in modern aviation, the G Super Hub.

[00:01:45]>> A glimpse tonight into how Quantis is planning for what will be one of the longest non-stop flights in the world.

[00:01:51]out this a huge day. It feels like something out of a science fiction movie. In just over a year from now, Aussie passengers will be able to board the first non-stop flight from Sydney to London. Emirates, Katar Airways, Etihad, free airlines that built entire cities on one simple flat. Everyone flying between Europe and Australia has to stop somewhere. And they have tried their hardest to make sure that somewhere was the desert. And that fact has quietly humiliated Quantis for years. You see, the Quantis Group has three big parts.

[00:02:23]Quantis domestic, which prints money.

[00:02:26]Jet Star, the budget arm, which also prints money. And then we have Quantis International, the longhaul flag carrier business with the flying kangaroo on the tail and all of the prestige. That's the problem child. For years, it's been the weakest performer in the entire group, beaten on price on some of the world's longest routes by exactly those Gulf and also Asian carriers. So Quantis is making a huge, huge bet. Take its most valuable passengers, the ones that are at the pointy end of the plane and remove the Middle East from their journey completely and reset the economics of its weakest division by flying routes literally nobody else can.

[00:03:04]And the investor logic is much bigger than just Sydney to London. Quantis says Project Sunrise creates three pools of value. New point-to-point ultra-long haul routes, a wider network reshuffle as A350s free up 787s for other markets, and of course, more freight revenue underneath the passenger cabin. So, yes, this is romantic. It's historic, and it's also a little bit insane. The timing should have been a disaster. This is the most expensive capital heavy bet in Quantis' history, and it's arriving in a year of spiking fuel prices. war and economic uncertainty.

[00:03:40]>> Surging fuel prices, these TSA shortages leading to a messy Q1 for the airlines.

[00:03:45]>> The cost of jet fuel has skyrocketed in recent months with the war in Iran.

[00:03:50]>> Normally, that's exactly the climate that kills a risky premium gamble.

[00:03:54]Instead, the chaos has made the project even more valuable because the very thing Project Sunrise removes from your journey, the Middle East, has become the most disputed airspace on Earth. So, how can 12 aircraft threaten empires built on hundreds? And why has the timing fallen so perfectly into Quantis' lap?

[00:04:13]To work that out, you have to understand the aircraft, the economics, and the geopolitics. And let's start with why this route was so impossible for so long.

[00:04:29]I mean, this part is pretty obvious, and it's distance. Sydney sits nearly 17,000 km from London. New York is around 16,000. For decades, reaching Eva from Australia's east coast meant stopping at least once. Think Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, or Los Angeles. It's simple, really. An aircraft that could carry enough fuel to fly non-stop couldn't carry enough passengers to make money.

[00:04:51]So, the industry moved in favor of hub and spoke networks. Emirates funneled Australian traffic through Dubai, Kata through Doha, Singapore Airlines through Changi and they turned that geography into an empire capturing passengers who had no choice but to stop somewhere. For Katar Airways, connecting traffic accounts for around 84% of all passengers. The hub was everything. For Quantis, this created a problem that ran deep on the Australia to UK market.

[00:05:17]Quantis and its partner British Airways hold only a minority share and Quantis cannot win a price war against them. The golf carriers have lower costs, newer fleets, nicer cabins at the moment, and governmentbacked hubs, and also the geographic luck of sitting in exactly the right place on the map. Think about that. The kangaroo route, a phrase Quantis itself coined back in 1944, had quietly become a route flow mostly by everyone else except Quantis, at least on the most profitable seats. So, Quantis needed a weapon the Gulf could never copy. There was only ever one candidate, directness. The single thing a hub airline can never sell you is no hub at all. And this is where Australia's distance becomes strange.

[00:06:01]For almost every other airline, being this far away from the rest of the world would be a problem. For Quantis, with the right aircraft, it becomes a moat.

[00:06:09]Because if you can fly from Australia to London or New York non-stop, suddenly the thing that made your geography so difficult also makes your product almost impossible to copy. Quantis' own investor presentation makes this point clearly. The airline says the opportunity comes from a combination of its non-replicable location, its stronghold market, its premium customer base, and the new aircraft technology.

[00:06:31]That combination is what Quantis believes can deliver a structural earnings uplift to Quantis International. In plain English, nobody else has exactly this geography, exactly this home market, and exactly this reason to build this aircraft. This was never a plan to move more people than Emirates. It was a plan to take back the best people, the ones who pay the most, and also to make the Gulf carriers feel it. But before any of that could matter, Quantis had to solve the part that had defeated the entire industry for decades. It needed an aircraft that could actually do this. To understand just how radical this is, we need to rewind just a little bit. Far side of the world, it's the same story. Into the evening sun, the Empire flying boat takes off. From the first experimental air service from Sydney, New South Wales to Southampton, the world's longest air route in 85 flying hours.

[00:07:20]>> Now in Great Ships of the Sky, British captains and their crews wing their way half round the world to Australia in 33 hours, almost 13,000 mi.

[00:07:30]>> For most of history, getting from London to Australia wasn't a matter of hours, it was a matter of months. If you were sailing back in the 1800s, the journey would take anywhere from 3 to 4 months at sea. Even the fastest clipper ships racing through the wind through the roaring 40s took around 70 days. The steam age and the sewers canal cut it to about 40 days. And by the 1950s, the great ocean liners had it down to just over 3 weeks. A direct flight in under a day was just totally unimaginable. The idea behind all of this is older than you think. Quantis actually announced Project Sunrise back in 2017.

[00:08:04]>> Quantis has always looked to the horizon. We've always pushed boundaries and flown further to connect Australians to each other and Australia to the world. The original kangaroo route from Australia to London took 4 days and stopped seven times. Soon with our new Perth London flight, it'll be 17 hours in a single hop. This plan is almost a decade old. And from the start, it was audacious. Quantis didn't go shopping for an existing plane because none could do the job. Instead, it threw down a challenge to both Airbus and Boeing. And they said, "Build me something that can fly Sydney to London non-stop. Whoever can do it will win the order." But an ambition is one thing, and Quantis needed proof that the economics would actually hold. And in March 2018, it got it. You see, Quantis actually launched a non-stop service from Perth to London using the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The route is nearly 14,500 km and the flight takes around 17 hours and 45 minutes.

[00:09:04]One of the longest passenger flights in the entire world. And the results massively beat expectations. And they settled something the industry had argued about for years. Passengers would pay a real premium to wipe out the stopover entirely. I've not flown this route myself, but I've had friends who have, and they've told me it's gamechanging. But Perf does have a problem. It's relatively small. Sydney and Melbourne on the other side of the country are bigger cities with more people and the lion share of Australia's premium and corporate travel demand.

[00:09:37]They also sit roughly 2,500 km further from London than Perf does. Too far for any aircraft on Earth to reach non-stop with a full profitable load of passengers. But Perf did something incredibly important. It proved the model. And now Quantis is building a much bigger strategy around that proof.

[00:09:55]In its new investment case, the airline describes Perth and Sydney as its two global hubs. Perf gives Quantis direct access to London, Paris, Rome, and Johannesburg. And Sydney gives it access to London and New York. Together, Quantis says those hubs can provide direct or one-stop access to London and New York for 99% of Australians and New Zealanders. That's a very different idea from the old Quantis international model. It's not just fly everything through Singapore or partner through Dubai. It is Quantis trying to build its own longhaul geography from inside Australia itself. So Quantis had its proof and its ambition. It just didn't have a plane that could do the job from the cities that mattered. It needed something purpose-built and something that didn't exist yet. Both plane makers turned up. Boeing pitched a version of its trip 7X, the trip 77-8, and reportedly offered an interim option built around the trip 7-9 with extra fuel tanks and fewer seats. Airbus, on the other hand, pitched a heavily modified A351000.

[00:10:54]And here's the detail that decided everything. The Boeing 7X program has been delayed for years. This morning, Boeing is pausing tests of its new 7X after finding damage to the plane.

[00:11:07]Boeing reported a charge of nearly $5 billion related to delays in its 777X jet program on Wednesday.

[00:11:15]>> The passenger version of the 77-8 still isn't in service and has effectively been paused while Boeing scrambles to certify the larger 77-9 first. Boeing eventually withdrew from the Project Sunrise contest in 2022. And had Quantis bet on Boeing, this might still be a slide in a presentation today. So Quantis chose Airbus and luckily they did. The firm order though didn't land until May 2022. Part of that gap was the contest between Boeing and Airbus itself. But a big chunk was due to co the pandemic gutted global aviation grounded fleets and Quantis shelved the entire project for roughly 2 years while it fought to survive. What Airbus eventually agreed to build became one of the most heavily customized commercial aircraft programs in modern aviation.

[00:12:04]This is not the first time a manufacturer has built a special aircraft just for Quantis. However, back in 2000, Quantis wanted to fly from Melbourne to Los Angeles non-stop with a full load. And the standard Boeing 747-400 couldn't quite manage it. So, Boeing built an extended range version, the 747400 ER with extra fuel tanks in the forward hold. Quantis was the launch customer and ended up being the only airline in the world to ever fly the passenger version. 25 years later, the playbook is pretty identical. A flagship jet modified of extra fuel tanks built around Quantis' uniquely brutal geography. Only this time, the ambition is obviously far greater.

[00:12:44]>> Quantis today unveiling the first plane of its new fleet to make the more than 20our journey.

[00:12:50]>> The A3501000 ulr, which stands for ultra long range.

[00:12:54]It's the first time we've seen it in Quantis colors.

[00:12:57]>> We need to start with a number that tells you everything. A standard H51000 flown by an airline like British Airways or Cafe Pacific carries somewhere around 330 passengers. The Quantis Project Sunrise version carries just 238.

[00:13:11]Quantis is literally taking one of the largest, most capable twin engine jets in the world and deliberately putting fewer than 240 people on it. We're talking six first class suites, 52 business class suites, 40 premium economy seats, and just 140 in economy.

[00:13:27]Quantis is throwing away nearly a third of the revenue passengers it could fit on every single flight. But that seat map is also the business model.

[00:13:35]According to Quantis, more than 40% of the seats on the A451000 ULR are in premium cabins. The airline calls it the lowest seat count of any A451000 in service anywhere in the world. And that matters because this aircraft is not designed to carry as many people as possible. It's designed to carry the right people at the right price over a distance nobody else can fly. So why accept that? Well, it comes down to weight. Every passenger and every seat adds mass and every kilogram needs fuel to drag it 17,000 km in one hop. Cut the passengers, cut the weight, and it extends the range. That's what makes Sydney to London possible. But the seats are the obvious part. The real engineering went deeper. Of course, Airbus engineers added a 20,000 Luxiliary fuel tank in the rear of the aircraft carried purely to complete the final hours of the journey. The maximum takeoff weight went up. Every system was optimized for missions running beyond 20 hours of continuous flight. And then the plane hit the regulators. European Safety Authority EASA examined the new full system and demanded significant redesigns before it would certify the aircraft. That work was slow and painful. And it's one of the reasons this whole project is running late.

[00:14:50]Early planning targeted 2025 and then late 2026 and then the program sipped again. But now finally the timeline is becoming real. Literally this month Quantis unveiled its first A3501000R in the full Quantis livery at Airbus's manufacturing facility in Tulus. This was the first time the aircraft had properly emerged as the jet Quantis passengers will one day fly on. Not just a test aircraft or an engineering promise. A second aircraft is already moving through its 8week testing and certification program, having taking flight for the first time earlier in the month. The first delivery is now expected in 2027. But delivery is not the same as flying you to London. For a start, one aircraft can't run a route on its own. As we'll see shortly, a single daily service needs a small fleet of these jets, not just one. So Quantis has to wait for the first few aircraft before it can launch anything at all.

[00:15:44]Add in months of crew training, certification, root proving, and final preparation on a brand new type. And Quantis now says the first project to summarize Sydney to London services will begin from October 2027, and tickets will go on sale in February 2027. The aircraft has effectively become a bespoke variant, purpose-built for Quantis, purpose-built for one mission.

[00:16:04]But building a plane that can physically reach London was only half of the battle. Quantis still had to prove that a human being could survive the trip.

[00:16:12]Before committing hundreds of millions to this, Quantis ran scientific research flights to study what 20 plus hours in a metal tube actually does to the human body. In 2019, Quantis operated test flights from New York to Sydney and from London Sydney using the Boeing 787-9.

[00:16:28]And each one of these flights exceeded 19 hours. The cabins were filled with sleep scientists, fatigue specialists, and passengers wired up with wearable trackers. And the findings flipped a longheld assumption. The industry had always assumed a longer flight simply meant more discomfort. But the research found something more useful than that.

[00:16:47]Arrival time matters. More than total flight duration. Passengers who landed in the early morning local time reported far less severe jet lag than those who arrived at awkward hours no matter how long they had been airborne. Light also turned out to be critical. Cabin lighting calibrated to the destination time zone measurably reduced circadian disruption. So did meal timing. Feeding people on the destination schedule rather than the departure schedule helped their body clocks catch up faster. All of this fed directly into how the aircraft was designed. You see, between premium economy and economy, Quantis has taken valuable cabin floor space that could hold paying seats and turned it into an open area with no seats at all. It's called the well-being zone. There's a dedicated space for movement and stretching, sculpted wall panels, integrated stretch handles, screens showing guided movement programs, and hydration stations.

[00:17:43]Healthy snacks will be available to every passenger on the aircraft in every class. Departure times will also be tuned to evening body clocks. Arrival times will target early morning. And the cabin runs 12 different lighting scenes, including sunrise, sunset, and awake, shifting through simulated dawns and dusks, engineered around circadian signs to drag your body clock towards the destination. The cynical read that this is marketing fluff. I mean, a wellness zone. But there is a stronger case that well-being zone might just be the thing that makes the entire route possible in the first place. I think the fact is that you cannot shove like passengers into a 19 or 20 hour flight and expect them to sit in their seats for such a long time. I don't think regulators would be very happy with that as well.

[00:18:29]If I were to bet I would be willing to bet on the fact that without the vet being zone these flights wouldn't happen at all. This is probably a hot take but but that's at least my opinion because I think even from a marketing perspective when you you know shove the messaging of wellbeing on first I think it helps with the fact that you have to also sell a 19-hour flight passengers might not have been on such a long journey previously in their lives and the rest of the cabin backs that up. The first class suites almost blur the line between seats and hotel room at this point with a 2meter flatbed and a separate armchair side by side. Business gets a sliding door for the first time on a Quantis jet ever.

[00:19:09]And even economy gets a generous 33-in pitch, which if you saw my video on airlines shrinking your seat, this sits at a rather spacious end of the scale.

[00:19:19]There's also a practical side to the comfort story. Quantis says it A350 will use heperilters to reduce 99.9% of particles. So the pitch here isn't just luxury. It's space, air quality, movement, lighting, meal timing, and cabin design all working together to make a 20 plus hour flight feel survivable. I mean, especially if you're in economy. I think in first or business class, you'll be absolutely fine. Now, the fleet itself is tiny and deliberately so. A single Sydney to London rotation ties up a jet for around two calendar days. So you need roughly three aircraft just to run one daily service. 12 aircraft therefore stretch only to three maybe four daily city pairs. And you're not going to see a daily Sydney London flight until two or three aircraft land in around March 2027. And Sydney to New York probably waits until aircraft number five or six come and that will be late 2027.

[00:20:15]The existing Perth to London route will also get an upgrade along the way with the A350 taking over from the 787 that pioneered it, adding more premium seats to the flight that proved this whole idea could work in the first place. But this tiny scale is literally the whole strategy. Project Sunrise is being run for position. It chases premium yield and leaves a business of moving passengers and bolt to everyone else. It really doesn't try to replace a hub and spoke flying. Emirates will still be carrying millions through Dubai, serving the fast middle of the market that just wants a lower fair. And that's not only economy. It's discounted business and first class 2. What Quantis is building sits above all of that. A new ultra premium layer for the traveler willing to pay 20 to 30% more to delete the stopover entirely. I don't think like the scale of the project is large enough to really move passengers away from their passenger flows. So that means like passengers flying to Australia from Europe or or the US or Asia. But I think it will still put the internet and people working inside these airline offices will notice. But I think again it's more about premium yields. It's not about the volume of of passengers going to London or New York directly.

[00:21:27]>> In late February and early March 2026, escalating conflict involving Iran, Israel, and several Gulf states triggered sweeping airspace closures across Iran, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar. Breaking news coming out of Iran.

[00:21:41]We have learned a short time ago, Iran restricting much of its airspace.

[00:21:45]>> Making news overseas and the United Arab Emirates has once again closed its airspace only hours after Eihad and Emirates were allowed to operate again following another airspace ban was lifted.

[00:21:56]>> The numbers were insane. Aviation data firm Syrium estimated that in a single twoe window, around 5 million passengers were hit by cancellations across the region. For April alone, the three big golf carriers pulled more than 5.4 million seats from their schedules. Doha was among the hardest hit with close to 80% of operations affected at one point.

[00:22:19]And Quantis wasn't immune. The conflict forced it to suspend its flagship Perf to London non-stop. You see, the 787-9 didn't have the range to route safely around the closed airspace with a full payload. So, Quantis had to insert a fuel stop in Singapore, adding more than 3 hours. But this crisis can be used as a strategy. You just need to look at a map. A Sydney London non-stop doesn't depend on the Middle East at all. The A351,000 ULR can route far to the north over Asia. So for a high yield traveler suddenly nervous about connecting through an unstable region, Quantis can sell something that barely existed as a marketing category a year ago.

[00:22:58]Certainty, simplicity, and a sense of safety. And those are exactly the passengers Project Sunrise was built around. I think people have rather short memories when it comes to these things, especially if they have not personally like experienced any kind of disruption while flying, you know, while flying through the Middle East or or around it.

[00:23:17]I think it could be an argument to skip the hubs in the Middle East when flying, you know, from London. I think business passengers will definitely benefit from the flights because I I think it it will be much easier to plan around a direct flight than it would be around if they were stopping somewhere because the text stop does introduce extra risk of something happening. Bushing aside the Iran conflict which is hard to do nowadays but mechanical issues happen, bird strikes happen. So you never know what kind of issues you might run into uh a stop on your way to to London from Sydney and with this basically eliminates the risk. A direct flight has one fewer thing that can go wrong. And in a year when the single most popular connecting point on the planet became a question mark, that could be worth a serious premium. A word of caution, though, some coverage has declared the permanent collapse of the Gulf hub model, and that's completely completely overblown. Emirates has already restored most of its network and is flying well over a thousand flights a week again.

[00:24:17]These carriers are resilient and enormously wellunded. This is very much like a temporary disruption and really not a death. But Quantis doesn't need the Gulf carriers dead. It needs them looking for a moment like the risky option. And in 2026, the Golf did that job for free. So Quantis has the aircraft, the cabin, the strategy, and frankly the luck. But this story of course does not get a clean happy ending. The thing is ultralong aviation is brutally sensitive to the price of fuel.

[00:24:48]>> The rising cost of jet fuel. Jet fuel prices flying skyhigh. From an average of $750 per metric ton before the Iran war, they're now up to $1,800 a ton. And with airline ticket prices rising to match, travelers are worried. An aircraft burns a chunk of its fuel every single hour just to carry the weight of the fuel it will need later. The A351000 ULR hauls those extra 20,000 L purely to complete the final hours of a Sydney to London run. You're burning fuel to carry fuel. At around $160 a barrel at the time of me writing this script, fuel alone can push a Project Sunrise flight beyond $120,000 before the aircraft even touches down.

[00:25:32]And the irony is brutal. The same Middle East instability making Gulf connections less attractive is also driving volatility in the jet fuel market. And Quantis needs these flights to survive.

[00:25:44]A sustained closure of the straight of Hammuz or a prolong regional war could push global fuel prices into territory that wipes out the premium pricing advantage completely. Quantis has hedged the large majority of his near-term fuel exposure. But hedges roll off. They protect against short-term shocks and not against multi-year shifts. But there's a second trap hiding inside the first. Airspace closures don't only hit the Gulf. If Russian airspace stays shut, if Pakistan or Indian corridors face new restrictions, or if polar routings become contested, then the H51000 ulr roughly 22our ceiling starts to feel a little bit tight. And this is why the whole thing balances on a knife edge. A fleet this small flying the longest routes in the world creates a very specific kind of headache. You just need to think about what happens when one of these aircraft breaks down. On a normal route, you swap in another jet.

[00:26:37]But the project Sunrise A350s are bespoke. That unique 238 seat cabin and there's no identical spare on the tarmac. And if the failure happens in London, for example, your nearest replacement could well be on the other side of the planet back in Sydney.

[00:26:53]Quantas definitely has if it has not yet, I think it will definitely plan for any kind of issues that that they might have put such a small subfleet. I mean they might have an operational spare of you know get for example one aircraft that's operating a route and then get another operational spare just to have you know something to do if it does break down. When you look at Quantis it's not really an airline that's isolated from the rest of the industry.

[00:27:18]It has plenty of partnerships you know it has a partnership with Emirates.

[00:27:21]There are options for to bring those passengers back. I think it will be I don't I don't think it will be, but it can get costly because of all the passenger delay compensation rules.

[00:27:31]>> And there's the irony. If a Project Sunrise flight, the whole point of which is to avoid the Middle East breaks down in London, one of Conniss's likeliest recovery options would be to put these passengers on its partner Emirates through Dubai. The exact hub where this project Sunrise is trying to escape.

[00:27:47]It's solvable. Quantis could position a spare or send an A380 to mop up a stranded plane load via stopover, but it's expensive and fiddly, and it's the kind of problem that will keep a fleet planning department awake at night. So, the operational picture is a small, bespoke, beautifully equipped fleet, flying the hardest routes on Earth where every kilogram, every minute, and every airframe counts. So, is all of this complexity actually worth it for Quantis? And for this, you need to follow the money. So, I went through the Quantis annual reports. And remember when I said the problem child statement I made at the very start of this VIDEO and then we have Quantis International, the longhaul flag carrier business with the flying kangaroo on the tail and all of the prestige. That's the problem child. In Quantis' most recent halfyear results to the end of December 2025, every arm of the airline was firing except one. Quantis domestic ran an operating margin of around 16%. Jet Star posted a record profit and also a margin of nearly 16%. Quantis loyalty, the frequent flyer business, ran at over 20%. And Quantis International, can you guess a measly margin of just 6.2%. And earnings actually fell 8% yearon year.

[00:29:09]And the reason comes down to the fleet.

[00:29:12]International still leans on aging expensive wide bodies. its A330s and especially its A380s which soak up engineering and fleet health costs while it gets beaten on price by lowerc cost rivals on the world's longhaul routes.

[00:29:25]Its modern efficient jets the 787 Dreamlininers are the bright spot and project sunrise is the division's bet on exactly more of that. New aircraft flown smartly to reset its own economics. The logic runs like this. On the routes where Quantis can't beat the one-stop carriers on price, it basically stops trying. Instead, it creates a handful of monopoly-like non-stop routes nobody else flies and fills them with premium passengers and earns far more revenue per seat. You don't need a huge fleet to move the margin needle if every seat is working that hard. Quantis has already got proof this works in the numbers flying right now. As mentioned, it runs a non-stop Perf to London service alongside its one-stop Sydney to London via Singapore. And there's one number that captures the whole strategy.

[00:30:12]Airlines measure how hard a route earns using something called rasque, revenue per available seat kilometer. And this is what that means. You basically take every seat on the plane, multiply it by every kilometer it flies, and ask how much money each one it brings in. It's a purest measure of how efficiently a route turns space into cash. And in those same halfear results, Quantis reported that the direct London to Perth flight has a rasp that's 22% higher than the indirect route to the same city, the same destination, the same airline. This non-stop earns 22% more from every seat purely from skipping the stop. It's a non-stop 787-9 route that are the single most profitable in the entire Quantis network. And on the same metric, premium cabins out earn economy by another 9%.

[00:31:00]Project Sunrise is a bet that what already works on the 787 will work even better and even bigger on the A350. And there's a softer number that also matters just as much. Airlines track customer happiness with the score called the NPS, the net promoter score. In plain terms, it's the gap between people who would recommend you and the people who would warn their friends off. A high MPS means passengers actually want to come back. and Quantis' non-stop 787 route score roughly twice the MPS of the rest of its widebody fleet. So what does Quantis think Project Sunrise is worth?

[00:31:35]Well, it's actually put a number on it.

[00:31:37]More than 400 million a year in extra earnings once all 12 aircraft are flying. And remember that seat km idea from a moment ago. All of the seats multiplied by the distance. These 12 aircraft alone could add about 20% more to the entire Quantis international operation. Also, the money starts arriving before the planes even do because the tickets will go on sale probably from mid 2026, well ahead of the first flight, giving Quantis a sizable cash boost just from advanced booking sitting in the bank. But there are of course big risks. Fewer seats showing the bill on an expensive ultra long haul flight is a big headwind. But there is a safety net and it's a pretty decent one. The A351000R is the modified version of a standard inproduction jet. If the Sunrise routes fail, those aircraft can easily be reconfigured and redeployed elsewhere.

[00:32:27]>> It really does put Quantas back on the international long haul map because it's such like a bespoke product and they've been, you know, very vocal about it. You know, Quantis is a publicly traded company and when it comes to publicly traded companies, their end goal is basically to be profitable and deliver returns for their shareholders. So yeah, profit is the number one success metric, I guess. You know, at the end of the day, if the if the project is profitable, it will continue and then they'll be happy.

[00:32:54]>> But the single biggest threat to that profit has nothing to do with the aircraft, the Middle East, or even the price of fuel. I think the biggest risk will be the fact, you know, will be the question whether passengers actually willing to be to fly for 19 hours, 20 hours and do it like several times a year if you're speaking about business travelers, you know, because they will be the passengers who are going to be paying a premium. And I think those patchers are those who are will basically make or break the project. I think yeah the biggest risk will be just to just to have repeat customers basically for Quantas on these flights because if they cannot get repeat customers I think the whole the whole business case just weakens. And this is where Quantis has an incredible weapon.

[00:33:34]It's frequent flyer program. Remember that 20 plus margin from the results.

[00:33:38]The most profitable business in the entire group. That's Quantis loyalty with over 18 million members with point redemptions up 17% yearonear. Around 70% of those points get redeemed on Quantis Group flights. And the program is built to reward exactly the kind of person Project Sunrise targets. The high status, high-spend flyer chasing lifetime platinum. Think about what that actually does. A Sydney London non-stop becomes more than a flight. It's the most prestigious status creditrich route in the entire network, feeding the group's highest margin business. And quietly, it will lock in that passenger into booking Quantis again. The loyalty flywheel is in effect the answer to the Project Sunrise biggest risk. The machine designed to turn a one-off 22-hour flight into a repeat customer.

[00:34:25]So, who actually fills these 238 seats?

[00:34:29]Flight after flight, year after year.

[00:34:31]The answer is, you know, very simple. If you were to sum up all of these people who are going to potentially take these flights, I think it's just passengers who are willing to pay premium just to get to London or or New York directly from Australia. I think it's just premium paying passengers. I think business passengers will definitely benefit from the flights cuz I I think it will be much easier to plan around a direct flight than it would be around if they were stopping somewhere. And this is a cleaner version of the story I told you before. If you saw my video on airline shrinking your economy seat, you'll remember CB Pacific, which crams 459 seats onto a single widebody and sells access to people whom the fair is the entire value. Project Sunrise sits at the exact opposite end of that same spectrum. Here, comfort and time are the only points. The passenger isn't choosing between this fair and not flying at all. They're choosing between a Singapore Airlines flatbed through Changi, a Q Suite through Doha, and paying more to skip the stop entirely.

[00:35:29]But let's face it, the Gulf and Asian carriers aren't exactly just going to sit there and watch contests peel off 5 or 10% of the most premium passengers.

[00:35:37]So what are they going to do to respond?

[00:35:39]I think it's a bit difficult to think about what they will do. Uh because I don't think they can do can't do much at least for the time being. You know, Australia is not an easy market to get into. I mean, we've seen what happened with Qatar Airways and what they had to do to basically increase weekly flights to uh to Australia with their original Australia partnership. But I think there might be some airlines that do increase premium capacity on flights to Australia. I think maybe Emirates or Kate Pacific will perhaps deploy aircraft that are more premium heavy than compared to what they have right now. So the answer is basically to fight premium with premium. load more business and first class onto jets flying to Australia and out luxury quantis while keeping the convenience of a one-stop network. The other more aggressive answer is to attack on price. I think it could yeah it could be one of those options because you know at the end of the day price matters a lot when it comes to passengers. I think that might be an option for them to just undercut Quantas but then again do they really want a prolonged like pricing battle when Quantas has has such a bespoke product? Project Sunrise is again not really about driving volume on on these routes. It's all about capturing a specific set of passengers that are premium paying. You know, there's not many like thousands of seats per week flying not tens of thousands but like 10 thousands of se seats flying weekly between uh Sydney and London directly.

[00:37:03]Quantas will not be physically able to fit everyone on on these flights uh if demand is high. And it's not just the established players Quantis has to watch because while it's been building 12 aircraft to route around the Gulf, the Gulf has been busy building a fourth hub. Saudi Arabia's brand new carrier Riyad Air will begin commercial flights.

[00:37:22]The airline is building toward a fleet of well over 100 jets, including 25 Airbus A351000s.

[00:37:29]So, a brand new GF hub run by an airline with effectively bottomless funding aimed squarely at premium longhaul traffic. On paper, it sounds like Quantis' worst nightmare. Except look at where Riad actually is on the map. Its launch network covers Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. And there's not a single Australian city on it. And even if there were, Riyad runs into the exact same wall as Dubai. It sits between Europe and Australia. Rooting a Sydney London passenger through it is by definition still a stop. So be it a newer, shinier hub. It's still a hub. And the one thing that Quantis is selling is no hub at all. At the end of the day, the fleet is so small, Quantis can't serve the whole premium market, even if it wanted to.

[00:38:11]There will be more premium demand than there are Quantis seats. So, the Generation carriers don't actually have to win. They just have to be the obvious second choice for everyone. Quantis can't fit. The Pi will just get more crowded at the top rather than Quantis like 100% owning it. But, we need to look at what the other airlines have done for years when it comes to ultra longhaul service. Singapore Airlines has been doing this for quite a while right now. It has been flying directly from Singapore to New York which is quite a lengthy flight as well. So I think it if this was a trend it would have started much earlier. Australia is a unique geography and it has enough demand to actually justify such flights. There's a hard technical barrier too. Most airlines couldn't copy this quickly even if they wanted to. The custom ULR aircraft don't exist in standard production. Matching them means years of negotiation with Airbus, ERA certification, and waiting for delivery slots. Boeing exited the segment in 2022, and the non-stop value proposition only really works from an isolated geography. Does Project Sunrise set a template the rest of the world copies?

[00:39:20]Could we see like United Airlines flying from New York to Sydney non-stop or British Airways ordering a small ulr subfleet go direct to Australia as well or isolated wealthy markets like the French Polynesia to Paris? The answer is well not really and not soon. I think it could be become a niche for more geographies, but I don't think it will become like the the next big thing in long haul flying at least for the time being cuz I think there are still technological limitations that do not really allow such type of flying on a huge scale. Plus you have to think about the fact that you know islands like Fiji don't really have I guess demand for such services to go year round because you know if you order bespoke aircraft for half a year basically to operate I mean to operate like specific very specific services for half a year then what do you do with them for the rest of the year?

[00:40:11]>> That last line is the killer constraint demand density. This is why flights from Sydney to London are pretty special.

[00:40:17]Australia and Europe are on opposite sides of the planet and opposite sides of the calendar. When it's winter in Sydney, it's peak summer in London. And when Europe shivers through January, Australians are on the beach. So in either direction, there's always a reason to fly. Australians escaping their winter for a European summer. And Europeans chasing the southern sun, which is what I'm going to be doing, going to Australia in December. The demand basically never switches off. And then you need to compare that to the transatlantic market, which everyone assumes is a model for long haul. New York to London is brutally seasonal.

[00:40:49]It's heaving in the summer and half empty in the depths of winter because both ends share roughly the same seasons. There's no counter swing to fill the planes the other way. That's why a bespoke fantastically expensive aircraft makes sense on the Kangaroo route and almost nowhere else. You need yearround high volume, high margin demand in both directions to justify it.

[00:41:11]Sydney, London has it and Sydney to New York probably does as well. Fiji to London? Probably not. But there is one airline worth keeping an eye on because right now Quantis is the only customer on Earth for the A51,000 ULR and Airbus would clearly love to change that because every extra order spreads the development cost and opens a brand new market for the aircraft. The obvious candidate that I can think of is Singapore Airlines. It already flies from Singapore to New York on a smaller ultra- longrange A350 and it has the premium demand, the network and the appetite. It wouldn't be a huge surprise to see Singapore Airlines order the A3501000 LR and start flying its own ultra long haul non-stops directly echoing what Quantis is doing here. If that happens, Project Sunrise stops being a one-off and starts looking like the beginning of a small trend. And actually, one quick update here. As when we were editing this video, Turkish Airlines recently said in an interview with Simple Flying that eight of its A351000s are expected to be specially configured ulr aircraft. And the target is Istanbul to Sydney non-stop by the end of 2027, which sounds like a bit of a direct challenge to Quantis. And these planes are expected to be configured in a very premiumheavy configuration. So, yes, Quantis won't be the only airline doing this, but it's not something the rest of the industry can copy overnight.

[00:42:33]None of this means a hub model is dying, cuz it really isn't. But for the first time, the most profitable passengers on one of the world's great routes have a credible reason to route around it. But when we're talking about hub and spoke models out of the Middle East, something is happening down under in Australia, which is about to massively benefit them. Actually, in October 2026, just months before Project Sunrise launches, Sydney's going to be getting a brand new secondary international airport called Western Sydney International. And it has one feature that changes things. No curfew.

[00:43:05]>> This morning, we've been given a first look inside Western Sydney's new airport with the prime minister to unic officially unveil the terminal today.

[00:43:14]>> Well, we're looking at a brand new international and domestic integrated terminal. Uh, it's seamless journeying throughout the airport. Lots of natural light, reducing stress. Um, people are going to find it wonderful to dwell here and to catch their flights. Sydney's existing airport, Kingsford Smith, has run under a strict night curfew since 1995. Most flights are banned between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. And for an industry where often ultra long hall flights love to depart and arrive overnight, that curfew has been a 30-year handcuff. And Western Sydney will run around the clock every day of the year. And the new capacity is already being carved up. Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines have confirmed international services from day one.

[00:43:56]Quantis and Jet Star will run domestic flights. And here's the part that matters for this video. Australia has just signed an updated air service agreement clearing the way for more, yes, more Gulf flying with Emirates and Katar Airways. and they're going to be cleared to operate from the new airport, adding extra weekly services through the curfew free hub. There's a bit of irony here. At the exact moment Quantis launches a project designed to bypass the Gulf, a new airport rolls out the red carpet for those same Gulf carriers to fly more into Australia. Although there's a real limit for on how far that goes, I guess. Uh yeah, I think more capacity is is definitely something that will happen, but you do have to remember that like air transport agreements between countries are also a limiting factor. So if Australia doesn't want Qatar or United Arab Emirates based airlines to fly to Australia, it is free to do so and just basically keep the agreements as they are right now. You know, the definitive answer is that yes, more international capacity will come into Australia as a result of the new airport. It just depends on how much.

[00:44:57]The second wild card is very speculative, but I just thought I'd mention it. A Gulf mega merger, specifically Emirates and Etihad, the flag carriers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

[00:45:07]They're based in the same country with the hubs just 140 km apart. Imagine them combining into one. I'm not saying this will ever happen, but it's often talked about in the industry. On paper, it's the only Gulf merger that makes real strategic sense. A single UAE aviation platform. two hubs, one enormous global network, and a staggering procurement power. Instead of ordering 50 aircraft, you can basically order as many as you want. 200, 300. And here's the link to my story. A combined Gulf super carrier could answer non-stop threat like Project Sunrise with overwhelming force.

[00:45:42]Think extra frequencies rooted through two different hubs, swamping Quantis' handful of seats with just sheer choice.

[00:45:49]But analysts have predicted this merger for the better part of a decade and it's never happened. Most of the obstacles aren't commercial. These airlines are instruments of national prestige for two different emirates. Emirates is the lightning rod for Dubai's entire tourism and property economy. And you don't merge two national champions because the spreadsheet says so. The consensus is pretty blunt. It makes commercial sense and politics will almost certainly keep it grounded. So, Quantis probably doesn't need to fear a Gulf super carrier soon, but the fact the idea keeps resurfacing tells you how seriously the Gulf takes the threat of fragmentation. A world where premium passengers have more ways to route around Dubai is exactly the kind that makes consolidation a little bit tempting. So, after all of that, the aircraft, the cabin, the economics, the geopolitics, is Project Sunrise really going to beat the Middle East? Here's my honest take. No, not in the sense of defeating the Gulf carriers, taking their crown, or ending the hub model.

[00:46:48]That was never the goal, and it was never going to be realistic. 12 aircraft cannot dethrone Emirates. But you need to judge Project Sunrise on what it's actually trying to do. And it looks far smarter. It rescues the margins of Quantis' weakest division. It builds a brand halo that puts the airline back on the global map. and it carves out a small defensible monopoly-like niche flying the world's most valuable passengers on routes nobody else physically can operate on those terms it has a very real shot and the timing for these flights launching that's the part Quantis couldn't have scripted and now finally this is not just a theoretical aviation project anymore has a route it has a launch window it has an aircraft in Quantis' colors it has the pilots already training on Australia's first A350 simulator in Sydney with more training taking place through British Airways in the UK and Cafe Pacific in Hong Kong. By the time all 12 aircraft arrive, Quantis expects more than 360 pilots and 1,200 cabin crew to be trained for Project Sunrise. So, how do you sum up a project like this in a single word? The best answer I heard wasn't the one I expected. Insanity.

[00:47:59]But let me explain why I think it's insanity because in a good way. I think it brings my brs romance to the industry a bit. I think we've been, you know, so focused on on on on on the bread and butter of what's been happening in innovation basically in the past few years. You know, there's been a lot of negative stuff as well, but I think it's just such a unique thing that's going to happen in a year's time basically. So, I think there's a bit of that romance coming back into the industry, you know, when it comes to people being excited about uh stuff that's happening in the airline business.

[00:48:31]>> I love it. It really does bring back a bit of romance to the industry. In 1943, Quantis flew the original double sunrise because there was no alternative. When those first passengers board the inaugural Sydney to London flight in 2027, they'll complete a journey that took over 80 years to make commercially possible. 12 planes, a handful of routes, and proof that the biggest changes in aviation don't always need hundreds of aircraft. Sometimes they just need conviction and the willingness to bet that how people experience distance matters as much as the distance itself. Whether it makes money is a question for the accountants, but in 2027 when that first A350 lifts off from Sydney and doesn't touch the ground again until London, I for one will be watching. Or maybe I'll even be on the flight.