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Qantas begins B787 revenue flights
November 3rd 2017
Sydney-headquartered Qantas Airways commenced B787 Dreamliner revenue flights on Wednesday. Read More » The first paying passenger flight departed from Melbourne for a six-hour transcontinental journey to Perth.
Qantas will operate its first B787-9 on domestic routes for six weeks for crew familiarization before putting the aircraft to work from Melbourne to Los Angeles from December and Perth to London in March.
Qantas has eight -9s on firm order from Boeing and also holds 45 production slot options for B787s. While it may not exercise all of them, the airline will almost certainly convert some into firm orders, although not necessarily for the -9.
“This is a flexible order stream, so with appropriate notice we could move from a -9 to a -8 to a -10. It’s a great level of flexibility that we have to manage our fleet plan together with Boeing,” then Qantas International CEO, Gareth Evans, said in October. Evans is now running Jetstar, the LCC Qantas Group subsidiary.
“Because of their size, these aircraft are going to be great for our Asian point-to-point network. With 236 seats there’s great opportunity and potential going forward for us to use this wonderfully flexible and efficient aircraft right around our network,” Evans said.
Separately, Qantas has said it was evaluating the B777-8X against the A350-900ULR for its plans to fly nonstop between Australia and New York.
Qantas is due to receive its second Dreamliner in the first week of December. The aircraft is undergoing final assembly at Boeing’s Everett facility. The oneworld member is configuring its -9s with 236 seats: 42 seats in business class in a 1-2-1 layout, 28 in premium economy configured 2-3-2 and 166 seats in economy class, with a 3-3-3 layout.
