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Qantas to start world’s longest direct flights from Australia in 2027

Carrier says customer satisfaction is high on its current direct service between London and Perth

Qantas Airways has said it will start its “Project Sunrise” ultra long-haul flights in early 2027 as the Australian carrier bets on strong passenger demand for direct routes.

Vanessa Hudson, chief executive, said the first of twelve Airbus A350-1000 planes on order would be delivered at the end of next year. The airline plans initially to offer customers some of the world’s longest flights between London and Sydney, and New York and Sydney. No decision has yet been made about which route will be launched first. The flights are expected to take up to 19 hours.

Passengers on the aircraft are expected to have to pay an estimated 20 per cent premium on London to Sydney tickets, but Hudson said the airline was getting strong customer satisfaction feedback on its current direct service between London and Perth that it launched in 2018. 

Project Sunrise is part of a wider refresh of the airline’s fleet with previous plans to upgrade its planes delayed in recent years. When the carrier ordered its planes in 2022, it had announced a 2025 launch for the ultra long-haul flights.

Qantas was still “very confident” in demand for the services, she told reporters on the sidelines of an Airbus event in Toulouse. She added that customer feedback had shown passengers were prepared to pay for the premium experience.

“There are absolutely customers who say, ‘I value getting there in one stop, I value point to point, I value the premium experience, and I’m prepared to pay for that’,” said Hudson.

Given the length of the flights, the airline is working with the Charles Perkins Centre in Sydney to study how passengers will be able to manage jet lag, “when to eat, when to sleep, when to move,” said Hudson. “We will be building that into an integral part of the in-flight experience.”

Qantas pilots have collected 12 months’ worth of wind data and are doing flight planning simulations. “There will be limits in terms of payload we will be able to manage,” said Hudson on the number of passengers, cargo and baggage the plane can carry. 

The airline will still need to carry out local certification flights before starting services. 

“We will need three aircraft to be able to have a daily service, either from Sydney to New York or Sydney to London. Then, as the other aircraft come on, we’ll be able to fill out the network,” Hudson said, but did not name any other routes. 

The successful launch of the project is a key test for Hudson, a Qantas veteran, who took over from long-serving predecessor Alan Joyce in 2023 as the Australian airline suffered a reputational crisis owing to severe service issues and a regulatory investigation into its practices such as the sale of tickets on flights that did not exist. 

The airline, which also owns budget brand Jetstar Airways, has invested in improving its service — including in-flight food and complaints handling — and its shares hit a record high in January this year after it revamped its loyalty programme.

However, the airline has faced renewed competition from its main domestic rival Virgin Airlines after Qatar Airways acquired a 25 per cent stake in the Australian business, which upped competition on lucrative international routes via the Middle East. 

Asked about disruption to Qantas flights during last week’s outage at London’s Heathrow airport, Hudson said the carrier had to reroute two of its flights to Paris and then bus passengers to the UK. Hudson said the airline had not considered taking legal action but added that such events were “incredibly costly” to operators.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems marked a major milestone Tuesday morning, announcing the installation of a key component of its Sparc demonstration reactor.

The new part is a 24-foot wide, 75-ton stainless steel circle that forms the foundation of the tokamak, the doughnut-shaped heart of a fusion reactor that CFS hopes will be the first of its kind to generate more power than it consumes. Called the cryostat base, it was made in Italy and shipped halfway around the world to CFS’s site in Devens, Massachusetts.

“It is the first piece of the actual fusion machine,” Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations at CFS, told TechCrunch. Work at the site has been underway now for more than three years as the company constructs the buildings and machinery that will support the reactor’s core.

“It’s a big deal for us, because it means we’re transitioning into a new stage of the project where we’re not building an industrial facility — we’re still doing that a bit — but we’re also now building the actual tokamak itself,” he said.

CFS is one of many startups that have emerged in recent years to pursue fusion power, which promises to deliver gigawatts of pollution free electricity from a hydrogen fuel derived from seawater. Investors have been counting on the technology to meet future power needs, which are skyrocketing as heavy users like electric vehicles and data centers proliferate.

The company, which is backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures among other investors, is widely considered to be one of the best prospects to prove whether fusion power is commercially feasible. The company announced in December that its first commercial-scale reactor will be located outside Richmond, Virginia.

Sparc is expected to come online in 2027, and if it works as CFS anticipates, it could be the first tokamak to produce more power than it takes to run. So far, only the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility has been able to hit so-called scientific break even in a string of successful experiments, the first of which occurred in December 2022.

But the NIF’s reactor differs significantly from CFS’s, using lasers to compress a fuel pellet to fusion conditions. CFS’s tokamak uses magnets to herd 100 million degree C plasma into a tight doughnut shape, confining and compressing it until fusion occurs.

Tokamaks use superconducting magnets to generate the powerful magnetic fields required to coral the plasma. Those magnets need to be cooled to –253 degrees C using liquid helium. The cryostat helps maintain those frigid conditions, acting like a thermos by insulating it from ambient temperatures. “The cryostat base is basically like the bottom of the thermos,” Creely said.

Just like someone receiving an Amazon package, CFS had to unbox and inspect the cryostat base before installing it. But unlike an e-commerce package that takes a few seconds to open, it took the CFS team a few days to remove the shipping material and another week “just to make sure that nothing got damaged in shipping,” Creely said.

The CFS team then moved the cryostat base to the tokamak hall, where precisely placed bolts protruded from the concrete foundation awaiting the stainless steel disk. “Then you grout it in,” he said.

Alongside the cryostat base, work continues on the other three major pieces of the tokamak, which will be assembled simultaneously into their final configuration either late this year or early next year. After that, CFS will ensure all the pieces are working together as planned, a process known as commissioning that will take months.

“This is the first of a kind,” Creely said. “There’s not just like an on button and it turns on.”

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Exclusive: Schneider Electric set to invest over $700mn in US energy sector

Schneider Electric is set to invest over $700mn in the US energy sector over the next couple of years, the largest single planned investment in the company’s 135-year history in the American market. 

The French industrial giant told Energy Source that the investment would create more than 1,000 new jobs and that the “vast majority” of capital would be directed towards the manufacturing of electrical equipment, including expansions in its factories in Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. 

“There’s an industrial renaissance happening in the US. It requires us to think differently about energy systems, about resiliency, about efficiency, about interactions with the grid, and frankly, about automation,” Aamir Paul, Schneider Electric’s head of North America, told Energy Source. 

The announcement arrives as the US electricity system undergoes a historic surge in power demand driven by the race to lead in artificial intelligence and the renewed focus on domestic manufacturing.

US electricity consumption, which is at record highs, is expected to grow by another 16 per cent by 2029, according to think-tank Grid Strategies.

In addition to expanding manufacturing capacity, Schneider Electric is opening a laboratory in Massachusetts to test power systems for the AI data centre market and an innovation centre in Texas. While the latter project was announced at the S&P Global CERAWeek energy conference earlier this month, today’s announcement marks the first time the company has made public its cumulative capital plans to invest in the US market.

Schneider Electric’s investment comes amid a flurry of large manufacturing commitments across corporate America in the first months of Trump’s presidency as executives seek to minimise tariff threats. 

Paul denied the role that Trump’s economic policy played in the company’s announcement and called for more clarity on the US president’s tariff plans. North America is the largest and fastest-growing market for the French company, making up 36 per cent of revenue, according to Schneider Electric. 

“We have to respond, like everybody, in the market where the conditions change. But at this point, we’re looking for more clarity on that,” Paul said.

Donald Trump considers two-step tariff regime on April 2

Possible phased approach to new US levies reflects debate over trade strategy within administration

Donald Trump is considering a two-step approach to his new tariff regime, deploying rarely used powers to impose emergency duties while probes into trading partners are completed.

The proposals the administration’s officials are debating would seek to ground the president’s “reciprocal” tariff regime in a more robust legal framework while enabling Trump to raise money for planned tax cuts, said people familiar with the discussions.

Trump has pledged to unveil his new tariffs on April 2, dubbing the event “liberation day”, and prompting a race by foreign countries to lobby his administration’s top officials for exemptions.

Trump on Monday vowed to impose “substantial” tariffs on the US’s trading partners, even as he suggested he may “give a lot of countries breaks”.

“They’ve charged us so much that I’m embarrassed to charge them what they’ve charged us, but it’ll be substantial,” he said, hours after announcing new tariffs on buyers of Venezuelan oil, which includes China.

The latest mixed message from the president reflected a continued debate within his administration over exactly how Trump will enforce his new tariff regime — and to what end.

Among proposals his team has been discussing is a plan to launch so-called Section 301 investigations into trading partners, while simultaneously using rarely invoked emergency powers to apply immediate tariffs in the interim.

The tools used to hit partners immediately could include the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or a little-known US trade law, Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, to potentially apply tariffs of up to 50 per cent on the country’s trading partners.

Lawyers and people familiar with the plans also say Trump could immediately apply tariffs on vehicle imports on April 2, resurrecting a national security study into the global car industry from his first term. Trump on Monday said tariffs on cars could be announced “over the next few days”.

Another option discussed recently — but now considered a long shot — is an obscure piece of US trade law known as Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows Washington to temporarily impose tariffs capped at 15 per cent for up to 150 days.

But the administration has not settled on its approach, with the purpose of the tariffs now in flux.

While Trump has complained of foreign countries’ unfair treatment of the US, his officials are more focused on using tariffs to raise revenues for planned tax cuts rather than as a bargaining chip with foreign capitals, say people familiar with the discussions.

This has prompted a quest to find tested legal options the president can use to hit multiple trade partners with steep tariffs as quickly as possible.

The two main points of contact have also differed in their approaches, say people familiar with the discussions. While commerce secretary Howard Lutnick has served as the administration’s chief negotiator, he has lambasted trading partners over their trade surpluses and tax policies, before demanding “a deal”.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer, a lawyer who previously worked for Trump’s first-term trade chief Bob Lighthizer, has increasingly asserted himself as the legal planner, seeking to create a durable blueprint for the president’s drive to reorder global trade.

To that end Greer, has advocated launching investigations into trading partners before applying tariffs, said people familiar with his thinking. This approach would rely on tested trade law but take up to six months.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said: “Although the final reciprocal tariff plan for April 2 has yet to be unveiled by President Trump, every member of the Trump administration is aligned on finally levelling the playing field for American industries and workers.”

The administration’s apparent determination to pursue its tariff plan on April 2 has prompted a last-minute effort by nations to offer concessions. The UK is weighing up options to soften its tax on US tech companies as part of its overtures to Washington.

EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič is scheduled to meet Lutnick and Greer for talks on Tuesday.

Any reciprocal tariffs unveiled next week will be an evolution of the universal tariff on exporters to the US that Trump first pitched as he campaigned for the White House last year.

Trump’s trade policy has been erratic, with the president announcing devastating tariffs on allies such as Mexico and Canada, only to roll them back — often hours later — in the face of intense business lobbying.

Since being in office, he has applied a blanket tariff of 25 per cent to all steel and aluminium imports, along with a range of new products made with the two metals.

After the EU said it would respond in kind to the metals tariffs, Trump threatened a 200 per cent retaliatory tariff on French wine and other alcoholic products.