Qantas’s shiny new ultra long-distance aircraft finally touched down on Australian soil on Friday, completing a 19-hour test flight from France that had 67,000 aviation nerds glued to Flightradar24. The Airbus A350-1000ULR - designed to fly up to 22 hours nonstop for the Sydney-to-London route expected in October 2027 - departed from Airbus’s Toulouse factory on Thursday and landed in Melbourne at 10:46am local time, covering almost 17,000km. The plane, which is not yet wearing Qantas’s official white-and-red livery but rather a tan coat with logos, will hang around Melbourne over the weekend before heading back to Toulouse on Monday - a return trip that Qantas chief technical pilot Alex Passerini says will take 23 hours, during which the crew will test everything from fuel transfer to air conditioning. “Everyone’s going to get tired,” Passerini sagely noted. The test model is the first of its kind to fly, having previously taken a 3-hour-43-minute jaunt over France on June 2. Qantas has ordered 12 of these beasts, each with 238 seats (because who needs 300-plus when you can have extra fuel tanks?), but the first one in proper livery - named Vega - won’t be delivered until April 2027. This is yet another delay for Qantas’s Project Sunrise, which has been pushed back multiple times; the latest plan had the service starting in the first half of 2027, but Airbus’s June update bumped it to April 2027. Qantas has previously mentioned Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney as hubs for direct flights to London and New York, but the June announcement was notably vague on that front, suggesting the airline will adjust routes based on customer demand - which is corporate-speak for “we’ll see.”