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Qantas restores Kangaroo route to London through Singapore and axes Dubai
September 1st 2017
From March 25 next year, Qantas Airways will cease operating from Sydney to London via Dubai and instead will restore the Kangaroo route via Singapore to London. Read More » As part of the route restructuring, Qantas will upgrade Singapore-Melbourne from an A330 to an A380. In other words, passengers can fly from Sydney or Melbourne to London via Singapore on A380s.
On the surface, it would appear that the Qantas-Emirates partnership is experiencing trouble, but Qantas Group CEO, Alan Joyce, suggested differently:
“The first five years of the Qantas-Emirates alliance have been a great success. Emirates has given Qantas customers an unbeatable network into Europe that is still growing. We want to keep leveraging this strength and offer additional travel options on Qantas, particularly through Asia,” the Qantas boss said this week.
“Our partnership has evolved to a point where Qantas no longer needs to fly its own aircraft through Dubai, and that means we can redirect some of our A380s flying into Singapore and meet the strong demand we’re seeing in Asia. Improvements in aircraft technology mean the Qantas network will eventually feature a handful of direct routes between Australia and Europe. But this will never overtake the sheer number of destinations served by Emirates and that’s why Dubai will remain an important hub for our customers.”
Separately, Qantas announced it would base four of its eight on-order B787-9s in Brisbane, complementing the four aircraft destined for Melbourne. The four Dreamliners earmarked for Brisbane will be delivered in the second half of 2018 and be used for expansion out of Brisbane and for replacement of the airline’s ageing B747s.
“We’ve said that initially our Dreamliners will replace the routes that our older 747s fly, but there are also new destinations we are looking at given the capability of the aircraft,” Joyce said.
At the moment, Qantas’ only B747-400 route out of Brisbane is a daily service to Los Angeles. It also operates A330 flights to Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo/Narita from Brisbane.
Qantas has said the -9s could potentially open up services to Seattle, Chicago and Vancouver. Of the three, Chicago makes the most sense, given Qantas’ oneworld fellow, American Airlines, has a hub there. Seattle and Vancouver are SkyTeam and Star Alliance hubs.
Joyce this week said the network decisions would be made in the next months.
Qantas will take delivery of the four Melbourne-based B787s from October and will launch its first -9 long-haul route, daily Melbourne-Los Angeles flights, on December 15.
From November 6 to December 14, Qantas’ first two B787s will operate on selected flights between Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. Starting March, the Australian airline will commence Melbourne-Perth-London, the first ever nonstop service from Australia to Europe.
The Dreamliners will have 236 seats, comprising 42 business class, 28 premium economy and 166 economy class seats. Qantas has eight B787-9s on firm order with options and purchase rights for another 15 and 30 of the type, respectively.
Last week, Joyce challenged Airbus and Boeing to develop an aircraft capable of flying nonstop to Europe and the U.S. East Coast, with a full payload, by 2022.
