Qantas Airlines Most Frequent Flyer Boards 996th Flight, To Antarctica

It’s around 11:30 p.m in Sydney, Australia, as this article is being written, and 82-year-old John Martin is preparing to board his 996th Qantas flight — and this time, it’s to Antarctica!

Being Qantas’ most frequent flyer, Martin will board the plane bound for Antarctica at Sydney’s Domestic terminal 3 and then return almost immediately, edging ever closer to his 1000th flight with the Australian airline.

As the Daily Mail reported today, Martin spoke to the press, telling them that he never intended to fly 1000 times with Qantas.

“I never had the aim of doing 1000 Qantas flights, just like I never said I’d live to 82. It just happened.”

And just to make Mr. Martin even more unique, and his story that much more special, the pensioner only took his first international flight when he was 32!

Martin made the following remarks.

“I’d flown down to Melbourne or Canberra before but my first overseas flight was in 1964. When I check in today, and see kids with their thongs, board shorts and back packs going off to see the world, I think: ‘Good luck to them.’ But in my day, air travel was very different, and very expensive. Basically, there was only one fare. Full economy, which allowed you multiple stopovers.”

The avid traveller added that air travel changed dramatically by the 1970s.

“Then, with the arrival of the larger planes in the early 1970s, everything changed. Suddenly where I had struggled to buy one flight a year at $700 return, I could do three trips at $200 return.”

Martin has reportedly been Qantas’ No. 1 most frequent flyer since 1989, but that only came to light, and gave him some fame, when marketers clocked on to him after he told a check-in crew that he had been flying Qantas for over 50 years.

In July 2014, Martin was invited to be on board Qantas’ 75th anniversary flight — “a 737-800” — from Fiji to Sydney and is now very well-known, even to the big wigs at the Qantas head office.

Martin also revealed that he has flown on other airlines, meaning he has travelled as an air passenger in over 1000 flights, as he admitted, he’d flown “around 120 with Pan-Am and a few more with United. If I’m going somewhere that Qantas flies, I’ll fly Qantas. But there are lots of places I’ve been to — and would like to go to — which Qantas doesn’t fly to. Really, I’m not obsessive about Qantas,” he said.