No international flights for another year, says Qantas

Qantas has confirmed that it won’t fly internationally at all this year, in a major blow to all those hoping to reach Australia any time soon.

The national flag carrier this week shed 6,000 jobs and released a three-phase plan out of the crisis which will see all its long-haul A380 aircraft parked in the Californian desert for at least three years, and 100 planes in total grounded for at least 12 months. International travel is not expected to begin again until next July, said CEO Alan Joyce.

“The domestic flight market will get back to maybe 70 per cent of pre-Covid levels in the next year and the following year to 100 per cent,” he said at a briefing.

“We think international will take a long time – nothing this next financial year, and next July we may start to see some international services and that will only get us to 50 per cent the following year, and only two-thirds of the pre-Covid international schedule.”

Qantas’ ambitious Project Sunrise, which aimed to operate the world’s first non-stop flights between London and Sydney from the end of 2023, has been postponed but not cancelled, he said.

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