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Qantas to decide on B787 top-up decision in 2018
December 1st 2017
Qantas Airways will decide next year if it will order more B787s, the airline group’s CEO, Alan Joyce, told media at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Read More »
The Australian carrier has eight -9s on firm order, with the first delivered in November and the second due later this month, but it also holds 45 additional purchase options and rights.
“It’s very important to get those initial few. Then you would order more as you demonstrate to your shareholders that the market can make a go of them. Like the 787, we had eight firm orders but 45 purchase options and rights. They come up next year for action,” Joyce said.
The -9 is a game changer for Qantas, that will enable the oneworld carrier to perform nonstop Perth-London flights from next March, the first time in aviation history that Australia and Europe will have a direct link.
In addition to the new ‘ultra-long and thin” routes, Qantas will replace its B747-400s on Australia-North America routes with B787s starting with Melbourne-Los Angeles. With flights between Western Australia and the UK covered by the B787-9, one final performance gap remains in the Qantas network: nonstop services from Australia’s East Coast cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Earlier this year, Joyce challenged Airbus and Boeing to develop an airliner capable of performing such flights nonstop, without payload restrictions, from 2022.
Airbus said it was considering both an extended range A350-900 and revisiting a shorter but longer-range -800 variant. The -800 only attracted eight orders from Asiana Airlines before the programme was unofficially put on ice.
Boeing said its B777-8, the smallest variant of the B777X programme, will fulfil Qantas’ requirements. Both manufacturers have told Qantas they would reserve production slots in the A350 and B777X lines in anticipation of a potential order.
“All the way through 2018 we’re doing the technical evaluation,” Joyce said in London. “The intention is that by the end of 2018 we’ll have that sorted. If we believe both aircraft can do it with whatever modifications are needed, we’ll do a competition in 2019.”
The Qantas boss said: “One of the Airbus guys said ‘this is like the space race – the first to get to the moon.’ They both really want to do it.”
