It takes longer to check in and travel to the airport then it does to fly to this particular destination and it’s the only flight where you can’t actually lie about your weight!
The shortest flight on the network: 16 minutes:
It’s so short that the seatbelt sign never comes off. It’s QF2469 from Mt Isa to Cloncurry, and it’s the shortest flight on the Qantas network. From wheels up to wheels down, the aircraft – usually a Bombardier Dash-8 – spends just 16 minutes in the air.
There’s no time for coffee or meals. In fact, it never really levels out. It takes off, hits 7000 feet (about a sixth of the top cruising height of a 787-9 Dreamliner), and then immediately begins its descent into Cloncurry.
It’s the Dreamliner that takes Qantas on their longest flight – the record-breaking non-stop route between Perth and London and takes roughly 17 hours to get to London and 16 hours to get back.
We’ve flown about 10 million kilometres on the Perth-London route so far, carrying 155,000 passengers and earning the highest customer satisfaction rating on our network.
It turns out people love both the comfort of the Dreamliner and the convenience of a direct flight.
That’s especially the case for whoever has been sitting in seat 56F, which has racked up more hours of in-flight entertainment viewing than any other seat on the Dreamliner this year.
Chances are its occupant binged a few seasons’ worth of Ballers, Billions and Modern Family – our most watched TV shows on the route.
And they may have paired that with our most popular meal: Guinness beef pie with potato mash.
The two flights may be polar opposites in a lot of ways, but QF2469 across the Queensland outback and QF9 from Australia to Europe have one thing in common: a flying kangaroo on the tail.
Whether it’s a short morning hop or a double-sunrise day, we hope to see you on board soon.
The only flight in the country that weighs you AND your luggage:
Is it ever okay to weigh passengers as part of the check-in process?
While this is not something that we do for most of our flights, it is a practice that has its place on certain routes to certain destinations.
Approximately 600 kilometres east of mainland Australia in the middle of the Tasman Sea is a small island with a population of 350 people and limited space for only 400 tourists at a time.
Lord Howe Island is surrounded by crystal clear waters and a turquoise lagoon. It’s home to some of the country’s most unique animal and plant species, very few cars, and has no phone reception. It’s beautiful.
We recently celebrated the retirement of Australia’s longest serving Lord Howe Island specialist pilot, Captain Ken Perry, who flew more than 2000 trips to the island during his 36-year flying career.
“There’s one day which will always remain in my mind. I flew out there and we had to hold and wait for a thunderstorm to pass through the island.
We fly the Dash 8 Q200 – a 36 seat narrow body turboprop – on our flights to Lord Howe Island. And if we have more than 27 passengers on any flight, everyone needs to be weighed before getting onboard.
So if you get asked Howe (see what we did there) much you weigh, it’s not personal, but it does help our pilots to determine the correct amount of fuel needed as well as to ensure we have capacity for freight.
As the only regular commercial airline servicing the island, our pilots do their best to make the most of every flight, freighting essentials to the island, and helping the people who live there to feel a little more connected to the mainland.
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