The latest leg of Qantas’ Project Sunrise publicity orgy touched down at Mascot on Friday, its non-stop “research flight” from Heathrow met with the mania (and hyperbole) of a bona fide Apollo mission.
With the outsized marketing tactics its master franchise is globally famous for, parvenu competitor Virgin Australia had launched its new Brisbane-Haneda service on Thursday. Virgin Group’s Sir Richard Branson threw in his typical spoiler, promising “we’re seriously going to look at” giving Qantas “a run for their money” on the incipient (non-stop) London-Sydney route. Which they're not and never will.
But the next day, feet on the ground for the first time in 19 hours and 19 minutes, a “not amused” Alan Joyce flashed his canines and prepped a Tallaght-style knuckle show. “I don’t think Virgin can do it. I think we will kill them on this one if we had to.” Got that? Richard Branson might be a knight, but Alan Joyce (AC) is a living saint.
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce front and centre at the arrival of the Project Sunrise "research flight" non-stop from London. Chairman Richard Goyder stands in the background. AAP
Quickly, the Qantas chief shifted tone from combative to dismissive. “I think Richard is [just] generating publicity …”
And while that is most certainly true, it’s also a sublime slice of hypocrisy coming from Joyce. For what was his jolly from London (and last month’s from New York) if not an extravagant
PR stunt?
Thanks to these “research flights” and their related rumpus, the vast preponderance of the travelling public – here and abroad – now labours under the misapprehension that from 2023, Qantas will fly this plane, the Boeing 787-9, commercially and non-stop from Sydney to Heathrow and JFK.
Barely mentioned was the salient fact that 787s cannot fly that far with more than 50 passengers, let alone 250 souls and several pallets of cargo. Nor did we hear that the planes which could, the 777-8X and the Airbus A350-1000ULR (neither of which Qantas has even ordered yet), haven’t even been built yet, let alone left the ground. Only in August, Boeing suspended all 777-8X development and postponed its 2022 entry into service.
Qantas Group chief executive Alan Joyce, centre, with flight deck crew in London. Captain Helen Trenerry, second from right, will command the historic London-Sydney flight.
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For some context, Qantas ordered the 787 in 2005, for delivery in 2008. Jetstar got its first in 2013, followed by Qantas in 2017, a full 12 years later. Mark our words: pigs will fly over the runway at Badgerys Creek before Qantas launches Sunrise flights in 2023.
So just who’s in the business of wanton publicity? In March, Qantas boasted it “generated over $100 million in free publicity” around the 2018 launch of its Perth-London route (we were on the 787 delivery flight in October 2017). That’s one they sell actual tickets on; as in, this year.
Addicted to the cheap acclaim, Joyce and his squad embarked on their blitzkrieg sequel, but with nothing to actually sell. And almost nobody noticed, or cared.
Still unquenched denouncing Branson’s black kettle, Joyce even reckoned “he will find it very difficult to compete against us because … we’ve got this expertise at long-haul flying that no other airline in the world has”.