14 ms·
Qantas offers a seven-hour flight to nowhere
- MichaelZuo 6y agoDon’t they already offer flights to Antarctica that don’t land for sightseeing? And those are 12 hour flights too. It’s interesting that other airlines are adapting by introducing these ‘excursion’ flights for the pent up tourist market.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DarthGhandi 6y agoYeah they did and it looked great. All the destinations here are probably more suited to getting out and exploring at ground level.
- paranoidrobot 6y agoUnfortunately for anyone in NSW, that's pretty much an impossibility at the moment. So if you did want to do sightseeing, you're out of luck.
- bishalb 6y agoWhy?
- paranoidrobot 6y agoBecause all the other states in Australia have closed borders with NSW, and you can't travel internationally.
- Balgair 6y agoAustralia is on lock-down due to covid-19. Melbourne's stage 4 lockdown only allows for a 3 mile travel limit from the home, for instance. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54045102 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54045102
- KuiN 6y agoAir New Zealand famously offered Antarctic sight-seeing flights in the late 70s. All stopped in 1979 when one of the planes crashed into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, killing all 257 people on board. I guess modern airliners make it safer but I was surprised to see them running today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus_disaster
- jonny_eh 6y agoSeems bad for the environment
- nickff 6y agoMost activities are bad for the environment, recreational activities are 'unproductive' and bad for the environment.
- beervirus 6y agoThis wastes more fuel per capita than most.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- missedthecue 6y agoPlanes are quite fuel efficient per passenger. Somewhere around 90mpg. Furthermore, I imagine this particular flight will free of baggage, lightening the load and improving efficiency even more. At any rate, most entertainment and recreational activities are bad for the environment, but as far as most of them go, this one is relatively clean.
- Johnny555 6y agoBut still, in 7 hours, a 500mph plane can go 3500 miles, so that's 38 gallons of fuel per passenger. A month's worth of gas for many people.
- brnt 6y agoNowadays, that amount lasts me two or three months!
- Johnny555 6y agoBack when the COVID isolation started in March, I put fuel stabilizer in our second car and filled up the tank (and hooked up a battery tender). I've driven it a few times, but the gas gauge still says "full" on that same tank of fuel. Even with the stabilizer I'm thinking that I need to take it out for a long drive to use up the fuel. At the rate things are going, I'm not sure I'll need the car for commuting until next summer.
- tyingq 6y ago"Your seven-hour scenic flight will include low level flybys of unique Australian destinations across Queensland, the Northern Territory and New South Wales including the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Byron Bay and iconic Sydney Harbour. " The offer did include some perks, not just a random flight over a bunch of random ocean. Similarly, wood cabin rentals are very hot in the US now. An opportunity to do something different that breaks up the monotony without notably raising the COVID risk. Fairly smart move from Qantas, from my POV. People are desperate for a safe(-ish) diversion. I found the "virtual safe room escapes" business model to be pretty similar.
- tesseract 6y agoYou can drive to, and stay in, a cabin with at most incidental interaction with other people. A seven hour sightseeing flight on an airliner is... not like that. I suppose it makes more sense in Australia where the coronavirus prevalence is fairly low at the moment, but from my point of view in the US the idea of taking the risk of getting on a plane right now seems especially crazy if I don't even get to land somewhere interesting.
- Hydraulix989 6y agoPlanes are low risk for coronavirus spread because of the filtered air that is replaced every 2-3 minutes. CNN: The odds of catching Covid-19 on an airplane are slimmer than you think, scientists say https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/odds-catching-covid-19-flight-wellness-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/odds-catching-covid-19-fl...
- neolog 6y agoI hope flying low over pretty places doesn't become popular. Planes are really noisy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 6y agoIt does depend some. There's a ton of difference between a 738-300 and a 737-800, for example. Crazy different engines and capabilities. Approach, angle, altitude matter too. I say this as a person that lives within a couple of miles of a big airport. So not guessing.
- brettermeier 6y agoBoth are noisy and dirty.
- asdff 6y agoSeriously, they just spew ultrafine particulate on anyone unfortunate enough to live downwind of a flight path. The health effects are dramatic, especially if you have a preexisting condition like asthma. The world doesn't need more flight paths scarring new environments until we are using cleaner energy sources to travel on them. https://envhealthcenters.usc.edu/2019/02/ultrafine-particle-pollution-lax.html https://envhealthcenters.usc.edu/2019/02/ultrafine-particle-... https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es5001566 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es5001566
- WWLink 6y agoWord. I live by a small airport right now and the plane noises don't bother me at all. Large airport flight paths can have different sounds though.
- Cd00d 6y agoI lived across the street from a small regional airport for 3 years in a rural college town. Overall, the turboprops that the airlines used didn't ever bother me at all. But, on parents weekend and at graduation, the airport had a lot of private jets flying in, and the noise difference between the prop planes and the jets was disruptive.
- brettermeier 6y agoWell, as if there is no climate change... stupid mankind.
- oh_sigh 6y agoHow's it different from flying somewhere for vacation?
- asdff 6y agoOne is transportation, the other is an amusement park ride.
- jbc1 6y agoBetter flight time to recreation ratio.
- lightgreen 6y agoThen people should spend vacation home, or in a hotel in a nearby town.
- cletus 6y agoWhile I agree this is a pretty pointless activity, I'll point out that modern commercial jets get ~89mpg/passenger [1]. A Ford F150 gets about 21mpg. Likewise commercial aviation yields about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger miles [2] compared to 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driving in the US [3], over 500 times higher. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#:~:text=Lufthansa%2C%20when%20it%20ordered%20both,seat%20layout%20for%20WOW%20Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#:~:te.... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20deaths%20per,flying%20in%20a%20commercial%20airplane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#:~:text=The%20.... [3]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#:~:text=There%20were%2033%2C654%20fatal%20motor,Columbia%20to%2022.2%20in%20Mississippi https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
- ezzaf 6y agoWouldn't it be better to compare fuel per passenger per hour rather than per km? It's entertainment not transport so the KMs travelled doesn't seem so relevant.
- gruez 6y ago>Wouldn't it be better to compare fuel per passenger per hour rather than per km? Why? The purpose of transportation is getting from point A to point B. Who cares if flights emit 5x the carbon per hour if it gets you there 20x faster?
- reaperducer 6y agoIn this case, it’s going from Point A back to Point A.
- lightgreen 6y agoCO2 emissions per mile is infinite.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
- aaron695 6y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich I would however say there is a market for explaining what you see when you fly.
- lifeformed 6y agoImagine doing this and not getting a window seat.
- lyime 6y agoSounds terrible.
- Johnny555 6y agoFor me, the best part of a 7 hour flight is getting off the plane (even when I fly business class), I can't imagine doing it for no reason.
- monomyth 6y agoyup, that's going to help with pollution so much. Why not just invest into cruise airships?
- bmn__ 6y agoAirships pollute, too. Look up avgas, it contains lead. Besides that, it's not profitable. Helium has become super expensive, and cargo airship companies barely break even while heavily subsidised. These airships are drones. A tourist airship which needs to accommodate real people and pesky safety requirements that come with them would go broke before the first lift-off.