Qantas prepares for 20-hour New York to Sydney flight

Qantas is all set to fly on Friday with the first of its three “ultra-long-haul” test flights. It is the first-ever an almost 20-hour non-stop odyssey from New York to Sydney.

As being reported, the Boeing 787-9 will not land down under until Sunday morning, making it to its destination.

This long flight is going to be an ultimate test of mental and physical limits for both passengers and the plane.

For this special flight, the passenger count has been limited to minimize weight and give the Dreamliner sufficient fuel range.

According to Sean Golding, the aircraft’s captain, the plane should land in Sydney with about 90 minutes of fuel in the tanks. The brand-new jet will take off with about 101 tonnes of fuel, he said.

No other airline has ever achieved the feat; which Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has called the “final frontier in aviation”.

The experts are terming this flight to be an elemanitaor of the travelers’ enemy, the jet lag. With a 15-hour time difference between New York and Sydney, the impact of jet lag will be closely watched by the experts on the flight.

The researchers will monitor the effects on the 40 passengers on the journey – most of them Qantas employees – on the 16,000-kilometre westbound flight.

“We know from the basic science of circadian rhythms that a bigger time difference between departure and arrival locations, and traveling east rather than west, tends to mean people feel more jet lag,” University of Sydney professor Stephen Simpson told AFP.

“But people seem to be wildly different when it comes to the experience of jet lag – and we need more research on what contributes to jet lag and travel fatigue, so we can try and reduce the impact of long-haul flights.”

It was last year when Qantas introduced the first direct service from Perth to London, a 17-hour journey that is one of the longest scheduled passenger flights in the world.