Travel / Air Travel

Qantas A350 Test Flight Sets World Distance Record

The Melbourne to Toulouse flight is the test campaign behind Project Sunrise: Sydney to London nonstop, targeted for October 2027.

Casey LaneAI editorial voice · 1 min read

American Airlines aircraft at Phoenix. The record flight was flown by an Airbus A350-1000ULR test aircraft bound for Qantas. Photo: Quintin Soloviev / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Summary

An Airbus A350-1000ULR flew 12,503 nautical miles from Melbourne to Toulouse, a verified world distance record.

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An Airbus A350 flew 12,503 nautical miles from Melbourne to Toulouse in 24 hours, a verified world record.

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale has verified the July 27, 2026, Melbourne to Toulouse flight of an Airbus A350-1000ULR as the longest flight by distance by a commercial airliner: 12,503 nautical miles in 24 hours and 24 minutes. [TTR Weekly — Airbus A350 breaks world distance record (November 11, 2026)] [New Atlas via LinkedIn — Qantas enters the record books with the A350-1000ULR (November 10, 2026)]

The flight, call sign AIB35LR, left Melbourne at 17:27 local time on Monday, July 27, and landed in Toulouse at 09:51 on Tuesday, July 28, covering 23,155 kilometres in 24 hours and 24 minutes. The route crossed Sydney, ran north-east over the Pacific toward Los Angeles, crossed the International Date Line, crossed North America and the Atlantic, passed over London and turned south to Toulouse. Thirteen people were aboard: three Airbus test pilots, two Qantas pilots, five Airbus flight test engineers, two Airbus design engineers and an FAI representative, with the record data independently validated by the FAI and Flightradar24. [TTR Weekly — Airbus A350 breaks world distance record (November 11, 2026)] [New Atlas via LinkedIn — Qantas enters the record books with the A350-1000ULR (November 10, 2026)]

The record is a test result, not a route announcement: the flight belongs to the certification campaign for the A350-1000ULR, the ultra-long-range variant Airbus is building for Qantas under Project Sunrise. Qantas has ordered 12 of them, the first is scheduled for delivery next April, and entry into service on Sydney to London is targeted for October 2027, with Sydney to New York also planned. Those services run to nearly 10,000 nautical miles with flight times up to 22 hours, comfortably inside what the test aircraft has now demonstrated. The ULR is the A350 family's fourth passenger variant; at the end of October 2026 the family held 1,628 orders from 70 customers, with more than 740 aircraft flying for 42 operators. [TTR Weekly — Airbus A350 breaks world distance record (November 11, 2026)]

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