Australian airline Qantas has completed an experimental flight from London to Sydney, setting the world record both in terms of distance and duration.
Qantas used a brand new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner for the London to Sydney flight, which lasted 19 hours and 19 minutes, covered 17,800 kilometers, and used 100 metric tons of jet fuel. Despite a passenger capacity of up to 256, the plane only carried about 50 people for the flight, including four pilots led by Captain Helen Trenerry.
The flight's duration overtook the previous record set in 2018 by Singapore Airlines' New York to Singapore route and also broke Qantas own record set just weeks earlier with another test flight from New York's JFK Airport to Sydney.
Both the London and New York flights are part of Qantas' "Project Sunrise," which aims to launch direct Sydney-London and Sydney-New York return flights by 2022.
The record-breaking flight, code QF7879, departed London's Heathrow Airport at 6 a.m. on Thursday morning and  flew over Germany, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Kazakhstan and China before heading south across the Philippines and Indonesia. Aside from the four pilots, the other passengers include Qantas employees and frequent fliers, as well as journalists.
They were fitted with monitors to track sleep patterns, movement, food consumption and use of in-flight entertainment. The data from these monitors were gathered by researchers from the Charles Perkins Centre, a medical research unit at University of Sydney. They will examine how ultra-long-haul flying messes with health, well-being and body clocks.
Qantas will also use data from the flight to seek permission to run the service on a permanent basis from Australian authorities. Qantas chief executive officer (CEO) Alan Joyce said: "These are test flights to show the regulator, and to make sure that Qantas is convinced we can do them safely."
"Flying nonstop from the East Coast of Australia to London and New York is truly the final frontier in aviation, so we're determined to do all the groundwork to get this right," added Joyce.
