Qantas Project Sunrise goes ahead, 12 new A350-1000s ordered

[dajop]

One of the biggest issues flying east from EU to AU is that the stopover always seems to interrupt the optimal time to be asleep to minimise jetlag.

It's not so bad on the flights that depart EU mid-late morning and transit SE Asia/HKG, continuing on to Australia arriving in the evening. But QF2 timing agree totally.

 

[justinbrett]

We’ll probably never know the commercial arrangements between Airbus and QF (nor Boeing if they’d got the gig) for the non-recurring engineering (NRE) to adapt the A350-1000 to meet the PS requirements. It would make sense if Airbus sprinkled some of those costs across the total QF order but they probably wore some of it to be free to sell the end result.

But again, that's literally how it works, the Airbus spends the money on development, they get it back in unit sales. They aren't selling the aircraft at cost price.

The cost to develop the A350 program was reported to be 15 billion Euro - which means to date, the first 10 million euro for every A350 sold funds the development, before any profit is made (in addition to the actual costs of building the aircraft).

Even if the cost spread over the 12 aircraft was 50 million each, that largely gets lost in the noise of bulk customer discounts - QF switching from Boeing to Airbus for not only PS but the 737s was quite a win for Airbus.