Qantas says it has chosen the A350-1000 for Project Sunrise flights and pushed back the deadline on whether to proceed to March 2020.
Qantas international boss Tina La Spina says the airline has asked Airbus and Boeing "to sharpen their pencils" on their Project Sunrise proposals.
The second of three Qantas ultra long-haul research flights landed in Sydney on Friday 19 hours and 19 minutes after taking off from London Heathrow.
A key milestone was achieved at the Boeing Everett factory in Washington in November when engineers completed assembly of the major fuselage sections of the first flight-test B777X, the manufacturer’s latest long-haul, twin-aisle jet.
To mark the first of three Project Sunrise nonstop research flights from New York to Sydney, this story from the Australian Aviation archives comes from May 2018, when Gerard Frawley wrote about the experience of being on Qantas's inaugural Perth-London Heathrow nonstop service.
Qantas's Project Sunrise evaluation heads to the skies on the weekend with the operation of a nonstop New York-Sydney research flight.
