Longest commercial flight in Quantas' history flies over Antarctica en route to Australia
The longest commercial flight in Qantas' history landed in Darwin on Wednesday night after a route that took it from Buenos Aires over the coast of Antarctica on a near-18 hour long haul.
The repatriation flight was the return leg of a charter flight that carried Argentina's rugby team home from Brisbane to Buenos Aires on Sunday after the 2021 Rugby Championship. The Department of Foreign Affairs were notified about the flight and worked with Qantas to use the returning plane to bring home Australians.
Flight QF14 took off from Buenos Aires at 12.44pm local time, 19 minutes behind schedule, but landed in Darwin five minutes early after a journey that took 17 hours, 25 minutes. The Qantas Boeing 787 Dreamliner covered 15,020 kilometres, exceeding the distance of Qantas' previous longest non-stop commercial flight, from Perth to London, which is 14,498 kilometres.
Speaking before the flight, Captain Alex Passerini, Qantas's chief technical pilot, said a lot of work had gone into planning the trip."There’s no change to the plane needed … it was designed around these sort of missions and it does it very well," he said.
Captain Passerini, who has flown with Qantas for 30 years, including on the Perth-London non-stop route, said flying over Antarctica's coast was the quickest way to get from South America to Australia."We'll end up flying over the continent at around 73 or 74 south latitude, depending on the winds," he said. "Hopefully the cloud cover will be kind to us and we can give our passengers a view."
The flight approached Australia from the south, crossing the Great Australian Bight to then fly over the Red Centre to Darwin. Captain Passerini and his co-pilot gave updates via Qantas' Twitter feed during the flight, pointing out the temperature hit minus 75° Celsius while flying over the Walker Mountains of Thurston Island, one of Antarctica's largest islands.
While Qantas has flown longer distances previously, most recently with the Project Sunrise non-stop flights from London and New York to Sydney, those were test flights that were not carrying paying passengers. Although the Buenos Aires flight is a one-off, it is the longest flight in Qantas' 100-year history to carry paying passengers. The world's longest regular commercial flight is Singapore to New York, operated by Singapore Airlines. The 18-hour route was suspended in March last year but resumed in December.
While the Qantas repatriation flight brought back 107 Australian citizens and permanent residents from South America, some Australians who had seats on the flight were forced to cancel their trips due to Argentina's closed borders.
Connecting flights from other South American countries were cancelled by the Argentine government, leaving some Australians scrambling to find alternatives in time to make the departure.
Source: The Traveller Australia
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