Why better beats bigger

A few weeks ago I flew to Sydney to speak at a conference. The first leg was on the new Qantas route non-stop from London to Perth, the UK’s longest flight. Two million people live in Perth, of whom 250,000 were born in the UK, so the route makes sense. But I was dreading the length of the flight.

Granted, I wasn’t travelling at the back of the plane, but I was surprised to find the 16-hour flight little worse than an eight- or ten-hour one. For one, there is the unexpected bonus that you can fall asleep whenever you like. On shorter flights, if you miss a narrow window-of-nod an hour or so after take-off, you are doomed to get too little sleep; here you could flip between sleeping, watching films and reading at your whim.

But the real difference is the airliner. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is to comfort what the Concorde was to speed. Its composite fuselage allows for higher pressurisation and humidity (and larger windows) than on other planes. Cabin air quality seems noticeably better, too, as does the lighting. Even after 16 hours, you step off a 787 without that grimy post-flight sensation where you feel an overwhelming urge to take a hot shower and burn all your clothes.

But the 787 is important in another way. It represents a bet by Boeing on a future of long-haul travel that is less hubby and spokey, where people can fly direct from A to C without changing planes at B. On the other side of that bet is Airbus with the giant A380; its creators bet on a future in which passengers would have to change planes, transiting from smaller aircraft to huge ones in the interests of greater scale and efficiency.