Plane becomes most tracked in the world as 10,000 tune in to watch flight path
It’s embarking on its first journey to Australia
More than 10,000 people spent their Thursday morning glued to a little plane icon crawling across a map, after a Qantas jet became the most tracked aircraft in the world.
The plane in question is the airline’s first Airbus A350-1000ULR — the ultra-long-range job built specially to fly further than basically anything else in the sky — and it left Airbus HQ in Toulouse, France, at 6:33am UK time for its very first journey to Australia.
Within an hour of take-off it had shot to the top of Flightradar24’s most-tracked list, with the watcher count climbing past 10,000 as the jet settled in for the roughly 19-and-a-half-hour non-stop run to Melbourne.
Why everyone’s watching one plane
The flight is part of Qantas’s ‘Project Sunrise’ plan — the long-promised scheme to fly passengers from London to Sydney in one go, no stopover in Singapore or Dubai, no airport-carpet nap at 3am.
The specially configured A350 is the aircraft that’s supposed to make that happen, with the first non-stop Sydney–London services pencilled in from late 2027.
Nearly 20 hours in the air, and thousands of us watching it happen from the sofa.
Aviation nerds pointed out that delivery flights rarely get this kind of audience — but then again, most delivery flights aren’t a dress rehearsal for the longest scheduled route on Earth.
The jet touched down in Melbourne at around 2am UK time, at which point, presumably, 10,000 people finally went and did something else.