When Qantas first flew between Sydney and London in 1947 on the “Kangaroo Route”, the journey took a whopping five days and included seven laborious stops. This week, the airline and Airbus announced that its world-first, ultra-long-range aircraft will travel on the same route from October 2027 – taking only 22 hours.
The brand-new A350-1000ULR aircraft will, in homage to those first aviators, be named after the stars. It’s a move inspired by Qantas’s pioneering Captain Crowther who reportedly used the cosmos as navigation when flying between the antipodean cities in the early twentieth century.
