Australian flag carrier Qantas has been forced to suspend non-stop flights between Perth and London Heathrow for the second time in five months because of ongoing security fears in the Middle East.
Worries about sudden airspace closures and a possible retaliatory attack by Iran and Hezbollah on Israel have prompted the airline to reroute its flagship 14,500 km flight from Western Australia to the UK capital via Singapore.
The new routing requires a fuel stop in Singapore, adding additional time to the flight in order to avoid overflying Iranian airspace while uncertainty remains about what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) might do as a response to an Israeli assassination in Tehran.
The last time that Qantas rerouted flight QF9 via Singapore was in April, just days before the IRGC launched its first-ever drone and missile attack on Israel.
The rerouted flight now operates as QF209 with a near five-hour flight from Perth to Singapore, where passengers must wait around for around two hours before the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner continues onto London Heathrow with a flight time of around 13 hours.
The new route takes around three hours longer than the non-stop service.
Thankfully, the return nonstop service from London Heathrow to Perth can continue because tailwinds make it possible to operate the flight even though the route now flies around Iran.
In a statement, a Qantas spokesperson said the airline was “making adjustments to some of our flight paths due to the situation in parts of the Middle East as a precaution.”
Non-stop flights from Perth to Paris and Rome are unaffected by the decision, and passengers flying on other services to London Heathrow won’t be impacted because they have already made a stopover in Singapore.
Unlike the situation in April, it remains unclear if and when Iran will launch an attack on Israel.
