AUSTRAL Belt - The Australs - The Routes That Cross the Bottom of the World

The belt named after it

The Australian Outback is the most visible piece of land on Earth from cruise altitude.

Most of the country is desert, or near-desert. Three quarters of the continent receives less rain than is needed to sustain agriculture. The soil at the centre of Australia is rich in iron oxide, which has been weathering and oxidising for hundreds of millions of years. Seen from above, in clear daylight, the centre of the continent is not brown, not orange, not ochre. It is red. A specific red that does not exist on any other landmass at that scale.

It is the red of Uluru. The red of the Simpson Desert. The red of the Pilbara mining country. The red of the dust that settles on every car, every shoe, every saddle that has spent any time in central Australia. From thirty-five thousand feet, it stretches in every direction.

That is AUSTRAL.

Not crimson. Not scarlet. Outback red.

The airplane seatbelt buckle is one of the most recognized objects in modern travel. Everyone has clicked it. Few have worn it on the ground.

AUSTRAL is what happens when you take that buckle, machine it in aluminum instead of steel, and fit it to a strap built for trouser loops. A real airplane belt. Made for everyday wear.

The austral routes are the lines that took the world a hundred years to connect. AUSTRAL is the belt that connects a deep red to almost everything in a man’s wardrobe. It works against navy. Against grey. Against denim. Against camel. Against tan boots and white sneakers. It is the boldest colour in the collection without ever being loud, because it is grounded in the colour of earth, not the colour of a flag.

It works with denim. With grey flannel. With cream linen. With khaki. With a tuxedo if the occasion calls for it.

It comes in two widths. Authentic at 48 mm, the exact dimension of the on-board strap, for jeans and cargo pants. Slim at 38 mm, for chinos, dress trousers and any standard belt loop. If you cannot decide, choose Slim. It fits everything.

Why these routes became mythical

Australia is far away. Not in the rhetorical sense, in the literal one.

Sydney is closer to Antarctica than to Paris. From the eastern seaboard, the closest major continental landmass is Asia, six thousand kilometres to the north. Reaching Australia from London means crossing eleven time zones and most of the planet. Reaching it from New York or Toronto, the same distance going the other way. For the entire history of European travel, getting to Australia was a journey of months at sea, then weeks, then finally, in the early twentieth century, days in the air. Then hours. The story of austral aviation is the story of that compression.

It started, oddly, with a prize.

In 1919, the Australian government offered ten thousand pounds to the first Australian crew to fly from England to Australia. Six aircraft started. Two finished. The winners were two South Australian brothers, Ross and Keith Smith, in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber. They left London on November 12, 1919, and reached Darwin twenty-eight days later, after twenty-seven landings, fuel stops in places like Pisa, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta and Singapore, and several near-disasters. They had effectively flown the route that commercial aviation would follow for the next sixty years, one bomber-length leg at a time.

But the people who know, know.

A few months later, in November 1920, three veterans of the Australian Flying Corps, Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness and grazier Fergus McMaster, founded the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services in the outback town of Winton, Queensland. Two open-cockpit biplanes, three staff, and a name no one expected to keep: QANTAS. A century later, Qantas is the longest continuously operating airline in the world.

In May 1928, Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew of three lifted off from Oakland, California, in a tri-motor Fokker F.VIIb named Southern Cross. They landed in Brisbane on June 9, after stops in Hawaii and Fiji. Total flight time: eighty-three hours over eleven days. It was the first time anyone had flown across the Pacific to Australia. Twenty-five thousand people came to watch the landing.

Then came the Kangaroo Route. Qantas first began carrying passengers from Brisbane to Singapore in 1935. After the Second World War cut the line, the airline restored it in 1943 with the Double Sunrise service, a Catalina flying boat that crossed the Indian Ocean between Perth and Ceylon and stayed airborne so long that the crew watched the sun rise twice. In April 1947, Qantas finally inaugurated the full route from Sydney to London on Lockheed Constellations. The trip took four days and seven stops. The branding came soon after: the Kangaroo Route, a play on the aviation word “hop”, and a flying kangaroo logo borrowed from the Australian penny coin.

For the next seventy years, every advance in long-haul aircraft was tested on austral routes. The Boeing 707 brought the trip down from four days to thirty-six hours. The Boeing 747 brought it to twenty-four. The Boeing 787 finally made the impossible possible: on March 25, 2018, Qantas operated the first scheduled nonstop commercial flight between Australia and Europe, Perth to London Heathrow, seventeen hours and forty-five minutes in the air without touching down. In the same period, Qantas, Air New Zealand and LATAM opened the southernmost commercial routes in the world: Sydney to Johannesburg, which dips as far as 71° south, Auckland to Buenos Aires, Sydney to Santiago, Melbourne to Santiago. None of them carry many passengers. All of them sit in cockpit folklore as some of the loneliest stretches of sky a commercial pilot will ever fly.

Below, on the eastbound legs of the Kangaroo Route, on the Indian Ocean crossings, on the long descents into Australia, you see something. Six hours from anywhere, the cabin lights still off, the screen showing nothing but ocean, the colour of the ground starts to change. It turns red.