by Jim Eames
Qantas’s innovations, such as a lower lobe galley to allow food preparation below floor level, meant the airline was able to fit fifteen more seats in the main cabin, improving the economics of the aircraft, while an extended upper deck increased its passenger appeal. Stepping cautiously into the jumbo era allowed the company to avoid the early engine problems and at the same time introduce a version of the aircraft more suited to its route structure.
There is little doubt that Qantas’s attention to aircraft evaluation and the importance of economics left Qantas with few peers in the jet age. At the outset, of course, the main advantage of the Boeing 707 was its ability to, in one massive stride, cut international flight times in half. In those early 707 days, fuel prices didn’t matter so much, low-cost charter operators were well into the future and the relatively high fares limited travel to those who could afford it. That began to change with the combination of the arrival of the Boeing 747 and its massive leap in aircraft capacity—and the fuel crisis of the early 1970s.
Barry Phair, a long-time Qantas executive with a close association with fleet assessment and aircraft fleet planning, recalls how Qantas had well-developed systems looking at route profitability as far back as 1974, a decade before most other airlines. The aim was to achieve the lowest possible break-even seat factor, that magic figure that defines the proportion of seats on board the aircraft that have to be sold for the airline to make a profit.
Working out the break-even seat factor is a complex calculation, particularly when ordering a new aircraft, as it involves assessments of revenue from passengers and freight on different route requirements, route operating costs, and the expenses for training the required aircrew and cabin crew to operate the aircraft, as well as the engineering infrastructure and tooling to service and maintain it. All come with high costs and correspondingly high risks in a marginal industry. Phair still talks with pride when, as a senior finance executive during the airline’s all-747 fleet era, he saw that break-even figure drop as low as 55 per cent in 1983–84, an achievement airlines of today could only dream about. (In an era where today’s airline has international and domestic entities both split by Jetstar, it would be difficult to ascertain a break-even load factor for the traditional Qantas international arm, although somewhere around 70 to 80 per cent would probably be a reasonable guess.)
There was one aircraft that would never carry the Qantas livery, but which was the subject of years of intense study, much of it going on behind the scenes and out of public view.
DISPELLING THE QANTAS BOEING 777 ‘MYTH’
Whenever the question of recent aircraft choices is raised among former Qantas people these days it is almost certain the Boeing 777 will be up for discussion. Everyone from pilots through to engineers and assorted ground staff will point out what a wonderful aeroplane it is, while claiming Qantas made a serious error in not adding it to the airline’s fleet.
The evidence, they will say, is there for all to see. While Qantas has continued to fly its large, and now ageing, Boeing 747s across the Pacific, airlines like Virgin, Cathay Pacific and others operate newer, smaller, twin-engine 777s that, particularly in Virgin’s case, provide intense competition flying across the Pacific to the west coast of the United States.
It’s not an easy argument to debunk but a closer look reveals a different story. It’s all about the long lead times, often running into more than a decade, that aircraft manufacturers and their customer airline must deal with when it comes to ordering a new aeroplane.
Those like former Qantas chief executive John Ward and the manager of fleet planning, Barry Phair, confirm that, when Boeing offered the first 777 for delivery to the airlines in the early 1990s, it had no chance of fulfilling the Qantas requirement. The first of the 777s offered for delivery in 1995 was a 777-200 version that was only capable of crossing the United States, to be followed by an extended-range version that could cross the Atlantic but was still far short of the Qantas requirement to cross the Pacific. Even then, says Ward, it was more of a replacement for the Boeing 767 than a backup for the airline’s 747 fleet.
Ward recalls Boeing’s response when Qantas indicated it was looking for something with much longer range. ‘They basically pointed out they understood where we were coming from but there weren’t many like us at the time.’
By the time Boeing was offering the long-distance version of the 777, the airline was already looking at new technology like the Airbus A-380 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. ‘Unfortunately the original belief has become folklore and it’s a little hard to topple with the passage of time,’ Ward adds.
When the supersonic Concorde burst on the scene in the 1960s it brought with it the impressive expectations of an industry once again on the edge of a quantum leap into the future.
Although well tested for years by the military, supersonic flight was a new frontier for commercial aviation. The ability to shatter the sound barrier had to overcome some serious economic handicaps, not the least its arrival at the same time as the 747 was opening up a whole new, low-cost, mass travel market.
To ensure its competitive position while it tested the aircraft’s economics, Qantas had taken out options on six Concordes in March 1964 and by the time the two Concorde prototypes—one British and one French—had their first flights in 1969, and with the introduction of its first 747-B only two years away, the airline’s technical development department had its hands full.
Technical development’s advanced projects section had taken responsibility for the ongoing evaluation of the Concorde and its suitability for Qantas’s services and would monitor its progress as the aircraft moved through to the production stage. Indeed, Concorde would become the most thoroughly tested commercial aircraft in history, logging 4000 hours flying before entering airline service in 1976.
Bill Bourke, then an engineer in technical development, recalls the countless route studies carried out to assist the airline’s economic analysis of its potential to Qantas, as well as keeping a close watch on how other airlines were positioning themselves for possible Concorde introduction. For instance, Bourke says part of Qantas’s options deal very much depended on whether Pan Am took up its own options on the aircraft, thus making the production of the aircraft a viable proposition for the manufacturer, something that was not to take place.
Meanwhile, those like Alan Terrell who might be responsible for actually flying the aircraft were also closely involved. Terrell admitted years later that he couldn’t contain his excitement when, one afternoon in 1971, his immediate boss, Qantas’s deputy general manager Phil Howson, suggested he catch a Qantas service that night for the UK to evaluate the Concorde.
Terrell often conceded how fortunate he had been to fulfil every pilot’s dream due to the fact that he was in the right place at the right time. Normally, such an assignment would have fallen to either of two other senior development pilots, Captains Fred Fox and Laurie Clark, but both were in Seattle on 747 development work. Not that Fred Fox would have been all that miffed, as he had beaten Terrell to the supersonic punch by some years. As a further sign of Qantas’s determination to keep abreast of the latest technology, as the world was approaching the supersonic transport era in 1963, Fox and another senior captain, Bill Edwards, spent several hours flying a Royal Air Force Avro Vulcan bomber at Filton in the UK to assess its flying characteristics.
Terrell’s Concorde experience at the British Aircraft Corporation’s (BAC) Bristol complex would have its frustrations. The first of his two evaluation flights went off without a hitch and he took some pride in entering the Concorde as a new type in his logbook as he waited for a Pan American pilot to take his turn the following day. Much to the dismay of BAC’s test pilot Brian Trubshaw, the Pan Am pilot, while executing a steep turn, heaved back on the control column, seriously overstressing the machine. Trubshaw immediately took over and straightened the aeroplane, at the same time leaving the Pan Am chap in no doubt about his anger: ‘Get out of my bloody cockpit. I ne
ver want to see you again.’
The end result was that it was six months before the aircraft could fly again and Terrell could return for his second flight.
Australia had its first look at the Concorde in mid-1972 when it flew into Sydney and Melbourne. It caused traffic jams around the two airports and, while it was a visit designed to show off its paces, one of the main tasks was to assess the impact of the sonic boom as the aeroplane crossed the Australian mainland.
The site chosen for sonic boom recording by Australia’s Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) was remote Hamilton Downs station, 80 kilometres north from Alice Springs, where sophisticated noise measurement devices would register the boom effect.
For those there that day, it would turn out to be something of an anti-climax, as hours of waiting in the hot sun finally resulted in the appearance of a sliver of silver metal ahead of a thin vapour trail, which began slashing the sky from the south and streaked overhead, to be followed by a sharp double report as the sonic boom hit. A Channel 9 television crew on site appeared a little disappointed in the resultant footage, although one of the DCA people noticed two crows sitting on a nearby fence momentarily jump slightly, then quickly resume their perches.
Australia’s vast expanse of open space might be a benign environment, but the sonic boom was to become a problem for Concorde as key en-route countries like Malaysia and India ruled out supersonic flights over their territory. The United States also banned the Concorde initially, even though Boeing was working on its own supersonic project. Although the American bans would eventually be lifted to allow operations into New York and Washington, increasing controversy surrounding aircraft noise greatly restricted the aircraft’s commercial application.
From Qantas’s viewpoint, it was more a question of simple economics. Bill Bourke and others continued to be involved in studies to develop possible supersonic corridors across Australia, but Concorde would never make it into the Qantas fleet due to a combination of factors. Although it had the capability to greatly reduce flight times between Australia and the UK, the reality was altogether different, with the aircraft’s high-speed fuel requirements severely limiting the number of passengers it could carry on the long stage lengths it was required to cover. One Qantas executive was heard to describe its usage on the Sydney–London route as ‘little more than a series of puddle jumps’ as it landed to refuel. ‘By the time it went subsonic over land and made a couple of extra fuel stops, it was not much quicker than a Boeing 747 on the Kangaroo Route to London and didn’t have the range for the Pacific, all due to an appalling thirst for fuel.’
Such a restriction, along with the advent of the 1970s fuel crisis and increasing concerns about airport noise, finally put paid to Concorde’s economics on any route beyond the nonstop flight across the Atlantic or between Europe, the Middle East and South America in British Airways and Air France colours. Even then, in an all-first-class configuration, it struggled to make a profit, largely filling the role of a spectacular flagship. Concorde ended its days as a remarkable technical achievement but one that had the misfortune to be in the right place at the wrong time.
Once again, Qantas’s rigorous application of its technical and economic forces had come up with the right answer as far as a new aircraft type was concerned. But there are still some who wonder where those ‘economic forces’ might have been when it came to the airline’s purchase of the shortened, long-range special performance version of the Boeing 747, the B747SP, in the early 1980s.
There was always a belief among some in Qantas that the Boeing company actually had the Australian airline in mind when it decided to build the 747SP. Around 14 metres shorter than the standard B747 and carrying almost a hundred fewer passengers, the SP certainly appeared an ideal fit for the airline with the longest route stage lengths in the world, with its ability to fly further than the 747 versions then operating. But the record shows that the two Boeing customers originally pressing for its construction were Pan Am and Iran Air, both seeking a high-capacity aircraft for nonstop operations between New York and the Middle East, with Pan Am also looking towards its services from New York to Tokyo.
Boeing certainly had Qantas in mind as a prospective customer, but by the time the specials were rolling off the assembly line at Seattle, Qantas wasn’t on the order books.
Attitudes in Qantas changed when Pan Am decided to use its version of the SP on the Pacific route between Sydney and the US west coast, where the availability of nonstop flights had considerable passenger appeal. Honolulu may have had its tropical delights but for passengers who wanted to cross the Pacific quickly, stopping there for fuel wasn’t one of them.
Obviously, Qantas had to closely watch its US competitor but the fact was that even with the added range of the SP, a nonstop flight was only achievable eastbound due to the prevailing winds that forced a scheduled stop at Auckland on the westbound leg.
Ironically, it would be Wellington in New Zealand that would turn out to be the major catalyst for a change of heart by the Australian airline, and mark the only time for decades when Qantas would not carry out a detailed economic study before the introduction of a new aircraft type.
The New Zealand capital, known as the ‘windy city’, had severe airport limitations due to a runway of less than 1800 metres, with water at both ends, and had reached a point where neither Air New Zealand nor Qantas could service it adequately with their larger aircraft. In fact, ten years had passed since Qantas had operated there with its own aircraft, the propeller-driven Lockheed Electra. Now operating an all-747 fleet, to keep its Australia to Wellington services open, the airline had been forced to charter an Air New Zealand DC-8—an expensive compromise adding little to the Australian airline’s bottom line. But now Air New Zealand had decided to sell its DC-8s and replace them with the DC-10, so Qantas’s options were closing fast.
The historically competitive nature of the relationship between Qantas and Air New Zealand made being the only one of the two airlines to service New Zealand’s own capital city from Australia a marketing opportunity Qantas’s then general manager Keith Hamilton couldn’t resist. The Qantas publicity machine at the time helped spread the belief that the airline had considered aircraft like the three-engine Lockheed L-1011, but Hamilton made no secret of the fact that Qantas would never operate a three-engine aircraft. ‘Not under my watch,’ he told Barry Phair. ‘It’s either a two or a four,’—and, although Boeing had its two-engine Boeing 767 in the planning, it was still some years away.
Meanwhile, Terrell and his people out at the Qantas Jet Base were quietly developing their own theories. When Terrell first told his boss their SP performance calculations for Wellington made it a possibility, Hamilton, who had obviously already broached the subject with Boeing in Seattle, disagreed: ‘They think it can’t be done.’
But Terrell’s chief performance engineer, Wal Stack, and his team had been working on an SP version fitted with more powerful Rolls Royce engines.
‘Well, you’d better get up to Seattle and talk to them,’ ordered Hamilton.
Once Terrell and the Boeing people had agreed, things began to happen quickly and Barry Phair and his numbers men waited for the go-ahead to develop the customary, detailed economic case for the aircraft. The call never came. Hamilton and Terrell’s team had made the decision on aircraft performance grounds.
Several weeks later engineering executive Bob Walker, who had close links with Boeing, remembers his phone ringing. Keith Hamilton was calling from Seattle. He’d been offered the SP at a cheap price. Walker was on the flight to the United States that night, under orders from Hamilton to ‘sort it out’.
‘He realised Air New Zealand were at a disadvantage and the opportunity was too good to pass up. I think we probably bought it for the wrong reasons but it turned out all right in the end,’ says Walker.
There’s little doubt Hamilton had achieved an attractive deal, as news reports at the time indicate Boeing had found itself involved in a poli
tical squeeze between Iran and the United States and the two SPs Iran had ordered had been cancelled. Few in Qantas would ever be privy to the actual cost of the two SPs Qantas acquired, as they came as part of a ‘package’ deal with Boeing for three other standard 747s at a total cost of $320 million.
Now Wal Stack and his team had to make sure the aircraft worked not only on paper but enough to convince sceptical aviation authorities to make changes to the normal operating procedures for such a large aircraft operating into Wellington. And there was another factor involved.
Wellington is not known as the ‘windy city’ for nothing and it has an airport renowned for vicious cross-winds, making the landing approach an interesting experience for airline pilots. Stack’s team devised a set of non-standard touchdown markings for the threshold of Wellington’s runway that would give SP pilots something to aim at. If the aircraft was not ‘wheels on’ at the right speed within those markings, a go-around was necessary.
After some early reluctance from the traditionally conservative International Civil Aviation Organisation and the New Zealand authorities, Stack fed the unique requirements into the training schedule for Qantas’s flight simulators at the Mascot Jet Base so that all crews rostered to operate there were familiar with them by the time the first of the two SPs arrived in early 1981.
While markings were being painted and simulators programmed, to boost the aircraft’s profile, Qantas took the SP on a four-day promotional tour along Australia’s eastern seaboard, flying dignitaries, travel and tourism representatives and media on joy-flights out of Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Townsville and Cairns. The company heralded the exercise as an outstanding success, although someone hadn’t fully taken into account the use of the aircraft for the first time at Cairns and the Gold Coast airports, with the result that each time the SP took off on a promotional flight its outboard engines blew away the runway lights!
