What is the next big step for Qantas?

Yeah your probably right. I thought if Qantas times the flights to arrive in Dubai soon after the Melbourne A380 lands you can have shorter connection time compared to when the Emirates flights. I'm only 20 with quite a little experience in this area. 

That assumes QF knows how to time an overseas hub. They killed their HKG hub by retiming flights to/from Australia to not meet up with the HKG-LHR flight, then said the route isn't working and pulled out.

EK has used up all their rights to Germany. They want QF to use Australian rights into Germany (eg, AU-DXB-BER/FRA).

Yes but what is the outcome ?  For those that are not influenced by corporate accounts, Perth to Europe flights are going to EK tickets, not QF code shares. 

QF are still sitting on the annoucement of the second city have A330 services to NRT, interleaved with the BNE-NRT service.  Given the planned 747 retirements, QF will need to remove 747s from Asian services to maintain their commitments to longer routes.  My guess is this will be covered by A330s.  SYD-HND goes to A330 and SYD-NRT 3 times a week is added.  Perhaps QF still need more aircraft, or perhaps the last few to come from JQ do the job, with some shuffling of -200 & -300 route allocations.  I don't see that they will receive 787-9s in time to address the gaps left by retiring the last 3 non-refurb 747s.

Would it be completely off the table to buy any A350s given the price of the 787s?

I'd actually argue that the A350 is probably not the plane for them; the A330neo might be a better choice. Really, it depends on what you intend to use the planes for.

I assume if Qantas bought some A330neos that would replace the 200s and the 300s would be replaced by the 787-9/10? Or could the 787-8 replace the A330-200?

International service back to ADL

I am a happy QFF then

Seasonal Flights and Virtual Reality. Soon we should see 787sband a return to Frankfurt, Perth internationally and Brisbane to Dubai.