Qantas drops UK-Australia flights until October 2021

Chief executive Alan Joyce predicted links with London will not begin until a vaccine is found

Distant dreams: the first nonstop flight between London and Perth in Western Australia (Qantas)

Australia’s national airline has pushed back the resumption of scheduled flights to and from the UK until October 2021 at the earliest.

All international operations on Qantas are currently suspended. But until now the carrier has been selling seats on its links from Heathrow to Perth, Melbourne and Sydney from late March 2021. 

According to Executive Traveller, that date has shifted back by seven months. The same postponement applies to US destinations.

Plans for flights to key Pacific and Asian destinations with low infection rates remain in place. They include New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

A Qantas spokesperson told the publication: “We've temporarily stopped selling on some of our other international routes like the UK and US until the end of October 2021, given the uncertainty in those markets and ongoing government restrictions.”

The airline is still selling tickets to and from London from April 2020, but these are “code-share” flights operated by Emirates rather than Qantas aircraft.

Alan Joyce, the chief executive of Qantas, told the airline’s annual general meeting last month: “We’re in the middle of the toughest period the national carrier has ever faced.

“For some of our big destinations like the United States and the UK, it's going to need a vaccine given the high prevalence of the virus in both of those locations.

"But we are getting more and more confident about the opportunities and the potential for a vaccine in helping getting those operations up… potentially by the end of 2021.

“When international travel does eventually return, our market share is expected to grow too, as overseas carriers take a conservative approach to capacity.”

In August, Qantas announced a “statutory loss” for the full year ending in June 2020 of A$2.7bn (£1.48bn).

Qantas is currently running a series of special flights from London Heathrow to Darwin in the Northern Territory in order to repatriate Australian citizens, who must obtain official permission to make the journey – and self-isolate at a former military base for two weeks.