Sydney, Australia - Australia's flag carrier Qantas announced that it would suspend all its international flights as of the end of March, including its Sydney - London route via Singapore, which is also known as Kangaroo route.
Since the Singapore government banned transit passengers from March 24, Qantas carried out its last flight to London on March 26 with a 90-minute fuel stop at Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory instead, before flying the 16-plus hours on to London with an Airbus A380. It's the first time that Darwin and London were linked by a direct flight.
The Qantas Airbus A380 with registration VH-OQK took off from Sydney for Darwin at 5 pm, and landed at Darwin International Airport at 9:15 pm local time after a flight of 5hrs 45min. Then, it took off from Darwin again at 11 pm local and touched down London Heathrow at 6:15 am today after spending 16hrs 45min in the air.
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Qantas' last fight on the returning QF2 flight from London to Sydney via Darwin will take off March 27, landing the next day.
As chance would have it, Darwin was a stop on the original Kangaroo Route in the 1930s, which took 37 days and included 10 stops.
Qantas is grounding all 150 of its planes until at least the end of May, including their 12 A380s.
Qantas has been involved in a few remarkable aviation moments in recent times. Last November, Flight QF7879 from London to Sydney became the world's longest passenger flight by a commercial airline both for distance, at 17,800 kilometers (about 11,060 miles), and for a duration in the air, at 19 hours and 19 minutes.
While in March 2018, a Qantas jet made the first direct flight from Australia to the UK, a Boeing Dreamliner voyaging from Perth to London. These Darwin-London flights might not be such legendary aviation moments, but they are another strange twist in what is a very tumultuous time for the industry.