As ultra-long-haul flights take off, where is the new final frontier?

There are few worse phrases in travel than “in transit”, but that limbo status where airline travellers are left in airports for hours waiting to change between two long transcontinental flights could soon disappear with the introduction of ultra-long-haul aircraft.

From March next year, Singapore Airlines plans to fly a brand new Airbus A350-900ULR (the ULR stands for “ultra-long range”), non-stop between Singapore and Newark airport near New York. This service was originally introduced in 2004, but discontinued due to heavy fuel consumption. New, fuel-efficient aircraft have made the route viable again.

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It won’t be the only airline travelling longer distances. March will also see Australian national carrier Qantas begin a service between London Heathrow and Perth in Western Australia lasting 17 hours (it currently takes 21 hours with a stopover). Not only will it be the longest flight in the world operated by a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, the service will also offer a connecting flight from Perth to Melbourne in Victoria, a further three-and-a-half hours east.

This will be the first regular passenger service to directly link the UK with Australia, but Qantas has even bigger plans. In August, the company stated its wish to fly from anywhere in Australia to Europe, something that the current fleet of aircraft are not technically able to do.

Alan Joyce, chief executive of Qantas, is adamant that the airline not only wants direct flights to Europe from Perth, but from the eastern Australian states as well.

“Qantas will challenge Boeing and Airbus to deliver an aircraft capable of flying regular direct services like Sydney to London, Brisbane to Paris and Melbourne to New York non-stop by 2022,” he says, calling this “a last frontier in global aviation” and “the antidote to the tyranny of distance”. Qantas calls the new venture Project Sunrise.