Is one long-haul flight better than 2 or 3 short hops?
Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2017 8:47 pm
September 9 2017
For all the hardships of long-distance travel, stopping mid-journey at an unfamiliar airport to change planes is generally accepted as one of the more trying.
So two pieces of news from Australia's largest airline created quite the stir among frequent flyers.
Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce puts a challenge to Airbus and Boeing to deliver an aircraft that can take passengers non-stop from Sydney to London by 2022.
Firstly, Qantas will drop Dubai from its network early next year and reroute flights from Sydney to London to stop in Singapore instead.
And in the not too distant future the airline hopes it won't have to stop anywhere at all, with chief executive Alan Joyce outlining plans to fly non-stop from Australia's east-coast to London and New York by 2022.
In doing so he put Qantas at the pointy end of a trend that has the potential to upend global aviation, as a new generation of aircraft threatens the model which underpins how we travel.
The cornerstone of long-haul aviation for decades has been the "spoke and hub" model: gather all your passengers in a central point (like Sydney or London), put them on a large aeroplane like a Boeing 747 or an Airbus A380 and fly them to an other well-connected hub (say Hong Kong or Los Angeles). From there, passengers can board smaller planes to travel to their final destination...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation ... ydd51.html
For all the hardships of long-distance travel, stopping mid-journey at an unfamiliar airport to change planes is generally accepted as one of the more trying.
So two pieces of news from Australia's largest airline created quite the stir among frequent flyers.
Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce puts a challenge to Airbus and Boeing to deliver an aircraft that can take passengers non-stop from Sydney to London by 2022.
Firstly, Qantas will drop Dubai from its network early next year and reroute flights from Sydney to London to stop in Singapore instead.
And in the not too distant future the airline hopes it won't have to stop anywhere at all, with chief executive Alan Joyce outlining plans to fly non-stop from Australia's east-coast to London and New York by 2022.
In doing so he put Qantas at the pointy end of a trend that has the potential to upend global aviation, as a new generation of aircraft threatens the model which underpins how we travel.
The cornerstone of long-haul aviation for decades has been the "spoke and hub" model: gather all your passengers in a central point (like Sydney or London), put them on a large aeroplane like a Boeing 747 or an Airbus A380 and fly them to an other well-connected hub (say Hong Kong or Los Angeles). From there, passengers can board smaller planes to travel to their final destination...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation ... ydd51.html