Speech delivered by Qantas Group CEO Vanessa Hudson on Tuesday 22 September 2026 in New York City.

Good evening and thank you all for joining us.

Tonight is about connections. This is about the connection between Sydney and New York, and between Australia and the United States.

This is a very important market for us. In the last 12 months, almost 800,000 Americans visited Australia and close to one million Australians visited the US.

What is incredibly strong about this market is that demand in and out of New York for us has almost doubled since 2023.

And Project Sunrise is coming. It is going to be an incredibly important part of our network.

We have been serving the US for more than 70 years. Today, we operate up to 47 flights a week, and we are the largest carrier serving Australia and the US.

We have eight destinations today, with a ninth starting in December when Las Vegas comes online, which I’m sure is going to be very popular.

And with American Airlines, one of our most important partners and also here with us tonight, we serve more than 200 destinations across North America.

Together with American, we offer the most comprehensive airline partnership serving Australia and the US, and we couldn’t be prouder of that partnership.

We are very proud of our history.

Qantas is the oldest continually operating airline in the world.

That more than 100 years of history has seen incredible innovation, from the inflatable escape slide to being the first airline to introduce Business Class in 1979.

But the next great innovation in our future is Project Sunrise.

That pioneering spirit has been in our DNA since our founders, who were focused on a mission to conquer the tyranny of distance in outback Queensland.

Project Sunrise takes its name from another step in that journey, connecting Australia to the world.

During the Second World War, the Catalina flying boats flew from Perth across the Indian Ocean. Those flights became known as the Double Sunrise because those on board saw the sun rise twice during the journey.

When Qantas first began flying to the US in the 1950s, it took many stops along the way. As successive generations of aircraft arrived, from the 747 to the A380, we were able to bring the world closer and reduce those stops for our customers.

Now Project Sunrise takes us across that last horizon.

We have an aircraft that will be able to connect Australia’s east coast to virtually any point on the globe.

That is an incredible asset, not just for flying London and New York direct, but also because of the role we play as the national carrier, including flying on behalf of government to help Australians get home in times of need.

We will be able to do that without stopping, and that is incredibly important to us.

In 2017, we set Airbus that challenge.

Airbus said yes to the challenge, and we both leaned into it.

I recently spent time at Airbus in one of the hangars with some of the engineers who have worked on aircraft like ours. There have been major hurdles throughout this program, but the Airbus engineering team never said no. They only said yes.

Coupled with the work of the engineering team at Qantas, our pilots and our flight planning team, we have built what I think is going to be an incredibly important aircraft.

It will give us a sustainable competitive advantage to fly over the hubs, fly around the hubs and connect these points on the globe non-stop.

We know our customers value that. But we haven’t just thought about the aircraft. We’ve thought deeply about the customer experience.

We’ve worked with the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney to study the science and data behind jet lag and ultra-long-haul flying.

Everything we’ve done, from Neil Perry and the team, to the lighting and the way we’ve set it on the aircraft, to the way we’ve designed the seats, has been focused on making sure our customers arrive in the best shape possible.

And now we’ve announced New York for 2028.

I wanted to finish with a story, because Qantas is about history and bringing that history with us on the journey.

You heard in the video about the Catalina flying boats of the 1940s.

Those aircraft flew predominantly at night over the Indian Ocean to avoid detection by enemy aircraft.

They had no GPS. They had none of the technology we rely on today. They had a compass and they had the stars, and those stars helped guide them across the Indian Ocean in the black of night.

In a nod to that courage and that pioneering spirit, a spirit I think is truly Australian, we are naming our Project Sunrise aircraft after the stars that guided those aviators in the 1940s, bringing a piece of that history into this history-making aircraft.

The first aircraft will be called Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

So when you see a Project Sunrise aircraft, you’ll know the story behind its name.

Thank you again for being here tonight.