Qantas has been closely watching rival Air New Zealand’s nine months of flying between Auckland and New York and has learned lessons from it.
The Australian airline begins its Sydney-Auckland-New York service next Wednesday and says the two carriers have shared safety and some operational information. But not much more.
“It’s a bit like Pavlova, I’m not going to tell them what’s in my Pavlova and they’re not going to tell me what’s in theirs,” says Anita Murray-Jones, manager fleet operations delivery at Qantas.
“We’ve chatted with Air New Zealand and where we always work together is with safety. (But) commercially it’s game-on.”
Auckland to New York is the fifth-longest non-stop route flying now, and the biggest challenge is flying back home into prevailing westerly jet stream winds at high altitudes. While flight times to New York can be close to 16 hours, the return journey can be as long as 17.5 hours.
Pilots can face vast tunnels of wind, the jet streams that blow at up to 400km/h in the upper troposphere, formed when cold and hot air meet. Blowing from west to east, jet streams hundreds of kilometres wide snake around the planet for thousands of kilometres.
As Air NZ knew what it was facing before launching the route last September and has been forced to offload bags twice and to make a pit stop in Nadi three times to take on more fuel.
Murray-Jones says such stops are part of ultra-long haul flying and Qantas too has contingencies for “gas-and-goes”.
But with years of planning for the route, observing Air NZ and using differently configured aircraft, it hopes to keep them to a minimum.
“It’s a tight timeline to have these flights on time and we’ve really learned that from Air New Zealand,” she said before a New York launch event in Sydney.
Qantas will use a 236-seat Boeing 787-9 on the route, the same aircraft as Air NZ (which has 275 seats) and a higher proportion of them in premium cabins. Air NZ has at times been forced to cut the number of seats sold for the return flight to 180 to save weight.
Murray-Jones says Qantas is allowing for up to 20 fewer seats on the westbound flight, to save weight and fuel. Under the airline’s PTT (Plan Tomorrow Today) system, payload can be capped three days ahead of takeoff.
“Our ultra-long-haul flights are restricted with how much fuel you can fit in the tank is like how far we can drive it. Sometimes we need to adjust that weight.”
The airline was looking closely now at the risk and duration of summer storms over the continental United States.
“We’ve planned for around 60 [minutes] at the moment. If we see storms that are longer than that, we’re going to need to carry more fuel,” she says.
“The decision will be made three days out to start to move some of our customers. It’s not ideal, but there’s always another flight for those people.”
The airline wouldn’t compromise on safety.
Qantas has also watched closely how much time Air NZ’s aircraft were taxi-ing at New York’s JFK airport, crucial as crew maximum work hours can be run down on the ground as well.
The airline has flown to New York via Los Angeles before the pandemic so knows what to expect.
“When New York gets congested with major storms or there’s other weather events your taxi times could blow out by an hour or an hour and a half,” she says.
“We’ve been watching Air New Zealand and how they’ve been going with their taxi times.”
Both airlines have talked to the Federal Aviation Administration and asked about being bumped up the queue for what is the longest flight operating out of JFK.
“Nothing is set in stone but they have said they would look favourably at our Aussie and Kiwi friends. Whatever we ask for, Air New Zealand will get the same grace. That’s because they recognise that we’re the two ultra-long-haul long flights from New York,” says Murray-Jones.
She’s an A330 captain but is also in the Qantas operations centre where she helps look after “the day of” flying from its Sydney base. Last Wednesday she was overseeing more than 400 international and domestic flights.
Research for the Auckland-New York flights has been under way for two years analysing weather patterns and possible flight tracks.
During the past few weeks, planning for the Auckland-New York flights has intensified with tabletop “war gaming” or scenario planning feeding simulated flight plans. The progress of the (on-screen) flight is then monitored.
“We’re running our plans daily to get our dispatchers used to planning, get our team used to looking at the weather. We really plan to expect the unexpected as we always say.”
Besides weather events at departure, en-route or the destination, other curveballs include avoiding erupting volcanoes and late passengers. If they’re boarding at New York they will invariably have luggage so this adds a further complication.
If Auckland Airport was out of action, Qantas could land its Dreamliner at Christchurch, Wellington or Ohakea and like Air New Zealand will put down in Nadi if it needs to “gas and go”.
Murray-Jones said the Nadi stops had worked well for Air NZ and Qantas had also had to make a limited number of tech stops in Auckland on its Dallas Fort Worth-Melbourne service and divert to Brisbane on one occasion.
“They’re not regular. They’re just part of the ultra-long-range (ULR) flying. But what we will do is we’ll try and prevent that.”
She says the airline had the luxury of having ultra-long-haul flights being deep in its DNA.
Depending on the route, the DFW-Melbourne flight is longer than Auckland-New York. Its Perth-London flight, started in 2018, is 300km further than the service to the Big Apple from Auckland.
There would be four pilots on the New York flights and they would determine the roster for flying shifts themselves, she says. The airline has learned more about fatigue management from its own ULR flying and from work it had commissioned from Sydney Universty’s Charles Perkins Centre.
The centre has researched sleep and its effect on health and will release further findings at an event Qantas is hosting in New York later next week.
Much of this work is also being used for planning the airline’s Project Sunrise flights which will operate from Australia’s eastern cities non-stop to New York or London and due to start in two years.
The 14,200km flight is at the edge of a Dreamliner’s range but Murray-Jones said Boeing software tweaks had helped improve this.
Airlines use the most suitable aircraft in their fleet on the day for their longest flights – the one most “in trim” and lighter than others in order to allow more fuel. Moisture absorption is one way aircraft gain weight and this varies within a fleet. Qantas now has 13 Dreamliners and has repainted some of its earlier aircraft which has resulted in some weight savings.
Departure board
Qantas QF3/QF4 (from June 14)
Air New Zealand NZ1/NZ2
One route had three times the average rate of cancellations.