Passengers hoping for a nonstop flight from Heathrow airport to Sydney will be waiting a while longer. Qantas has revealed another postponement to “Project Sunrise” – the plan for the world’s longest flights, connecting Sydney with both London and New York.

Delivery delays by Airbus mean the Australian airline will not now begin services in the first half of 2027.

The link from Heathrow is expected to take around 19 hours, four hours faster than the current one-stop flight via Singapore.

For its flagship project, Qantas has ordered 12 Airbus A350 aircraft specially configured with an additional fuel tank. Both of the proposed routes require three planes to maintain a daily non-stop service.

A spokesperson for the airline said: “While the first aircraft delivery has shifted to April 2027, the next four will follow in quick succession, putting us back on our original schedule by November.

“We continue to work closely with Airbus on the delivery and certification process that will enable us to begin operating these history-making ultra long-haul flights.”

Qantas will announce a new start date, and whether the first route will serve London or New York, at an event at the Airbus HQ in Toulouse in June.

In 2017, the airline’s then-chief executive, Alan Joyce, announced “the antidote to the tyranny of distance”: nonstop flights, with a full payload, on routes such as “Sydney-London, Brisbane-Paris and Melbourne-New York”.

The CEO said Qantas planned to start one or both of the links in 2022. In 2019, the carrier flew a near empty Boeing 787 from Heathrow to Sydney “as an “ultra-long haul research flight to gather new data about inflight passenger and crew health and wellbeing”.

But the project was paused during the Covid pandemic. The Airbus jets were ordered in May 2022, with services planned to start “in late 2025”.

Issues with the additional fuel tank caused a further delay, with the launch expected to be in the first half of 2027. But the delivery delays, due to supply chain problems, mean that deadline is now missed. Once the planes start to arrive with Qantas, the carrier must make training flights to gain regulatory approval.

The Russian ban on Qantas and other western airlines, as well as the closure of some Middle East airspace, means the London-Sydney flight will need to take a longer route – using even more fuel than intended.

But demand for flights that do not involve a stop in the Gulf region has intensified.

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