Qantas delays plans to fly new Airbus A220s on upcoming Singapore-Darwin route

SINGAPORE – Australian flag carrier Qantas has pushed back plans to fly its new Airbus A220 planes on the airline’s upcoming Singapore-Darwin route, in what would have been the aircraft type’s South-east Asian debut.

Instead, the airline will use the older but larger Boeing 737-800 jets when it restarts services between Changi Airport and the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory on March 30.

Its A220s will take over the five-hour flights at the end of October, the airline said on Feb 14.

It told The Straits Times that the A220s were being removed from the Singapore-Darwin route temporarily to support the retraining of pilots from its regional subsidiary QantasLink. This is so that they will be able to operate the new jets.

As Qantas’ B737 planes offer 37 more seats than the 137-seat A220s, the schedule for the upcoming Singapore-Darwin service will be adjusted accordingly.

With the B737s, Qantas will fly four times weekly between the two cities, in the light of the plane’s larger capacity. This will be increased to five flights a week when the smaller A220s take over.

These schedule changes mean that Qantas will be able to maintain the number of seats on the Singapore-Darwin route as previously announced, totalling more than 70,000 each year.

The A220 is European jet maker Airbus’ latest narrow-body aircraft. While it is popular among European and American carriers, it is operated only by Qantas and Korean Air in the Asia-Pacific region for now.

Qantas has said the single-aisle planes, which the airline has been using on some domestic routes since March 2024, have a modern cabin design and are significantly more fuel-efficient than older aircraft.

The planes, however, lack the seat-back screens that the Qantas B737s have.

Qantas had initially planned to use even smaller Embraer E190 jets on flights between Singapore and Darwin when it announced in January 2024 that it would restart the service. The Embraer jet comes mostly in a 94-seat configuration.

But, in October 2024, the airline decided to use the A220s, as it felt they were a better long-term fit.

Qantas last operated non-stop flights between Singapore and Darwin in 2006 using wide-body Boeing 767 planes.

Jetstar, the airline’s low-cost subsidiary, took over the route that same year, before later transferring it to sister airline Jetstar Asia, which continued to operate the non-stop service until August 2022.

The addition of Qantas flights between Singapore and Darwin will inject competition into a route now served only by Singapore Airlines.

The national carrier operates seven non-stop flights a week using 154-seat Boeing 737-8 Max planes.