December 2009 Archives

In two hours at 6:10 PM Australian eastern time, a Qantas A380 charted by Croydon Travel will depart Melbourne as QF 2903 for a 12 hour sightseeing trip to Antarctica. It will be the first time an A380 has been in the south polar region, according to Croydon.

Qantas and Air New Zealand have previously conducted sightseeing tours. On these flights the aircraft does not land on the continent but rather passes over during a four hour period. You can read more here from the when the A380 flight was first announced.

Phil Asker, who manages the Antarctic flights for Croydon, says this was the first New Year's Eve his company could conduct the flight with an A380. While Qantas took delivery of its first A380 in September 2008, Asker says the aircraft was not available for Antarctic charters until this past July. There is a five year approval to use the A380, he adds. Already Croydon plans another A380 trip on 24 January 2010.

Tonight's flight, with 450 passengers as well as a suite of crew, is due to overfly Tasmania en route to Antarctica, Croydon says. Reaching the continent will take four hours. Some 19 flight tracks are at the crew's disposal to choose from based on weather and other navigation requirements.

Croydon says of the most likely route:

The most frequently-selected flightseeing route takes sightseers over sea ice and the South Magnetic Pole about 3 ½ hours south of Melbourne, en route to the French research base of Dumont d'Urville.

There, the aircraft will turn and fly above the jagged coast of Antarctica, before heading inland and flying figure-eight patterns over glaciers and frozen terrain which stretches as far as the eye can see.

The final phase of sightseeing on a typical Antarctica flight takes the aircraft over the spectacular Trans Antarctic Range.

Croydon says the passengers on board the flight will be the first to glimpse the new year light. No doubt those passengers will have a great New Year's Eve, but a very happy 2010 to all of you as well.

On a recent Virgin Blue flight I was flipping through its in-flight magazine Voyeur. On page 124 listing codeshares and interline agreements, I read this curious statement under Qatar Airways: 

Direct flights between Melbourne and Doha commence December 2009, and between Sydney and Doha commence April 2010.

As this decade draws to an end (if you ignore when the millennium actually was) and commentators seek to define it, aviation's decade legacy in Australia is clear. On the international front, traffic shifted from European carriers to Asian carriers.

Australia had historically been tied to Europe--Britain especially--and those ties were replicated in air services. Air France, Alitalia, Austrian, and KLM are some of the carriers Australia saw in its heyday of European flights.

Now only British Airways and Virgin Atlantic remain, and BA has seasonally reduced one of its B747-400 services to a B777-200. [Update 4 Feb 2010: BA will reduce its services again this year.]

On the other hand, Asia has grown increasingly important to Australia. On the political front, Kevin Rudd was elected as Prime Minister in 2007 with many impressed by his fluent Mandarin.

Melbourne Airport CEO Chris Woodruff recently said that his airport saw Chinese passengers overtake UK passengers as the most frequent international visitors in 2008.

In October China Southern announced it would up its Guangzhou-Sydney service from 5 weekly to daily until 20 February 2010. It previously flew an add-on sector to Melbourne from Sydney, but through 25 March 2010 will operate thrice weekly non-stops to Melbourne.

Yesterday the carrier, the fifth largest in China, announced it would increase capacity to Sydney by approximately 10% by upgrading the A330-200 with an A330-300. The increase sees the introduction of first class with 4 seats along with 24 additional economy seats.

Late last month AirAsia X announced it would go double daily (from 11x weekly) to Melbourne in the peak travel periods of February and July. CEO Azran Osman-Rani said his low-cost, long-haul carrier in the near future plans to add more frequencies in Australia, and hopefully serve Sydney.