Qantas redemption seats on a Boeing 787 delivery flight?

And tag on a tour of the Boeing factory.

QF has a special exemption to be allowed to sell seats on LAX-JFK and then only for passengers connecting to/from flights to/from AU. I do wonder whether the necessary approvals could be too big a hurdle to selling points seats on a delivery flight.

There's all kind of issues that most airlines probably don't want to deal with to offer seats on delivery flights.

It won't happen - a delivery is a moving flight and can change very frequently in the last week. All sorts of things can go wrong and they also want to get the aircraft to Australia as soon as possible to do pre-service modifications so it can go into service. The fleet doesn't have the slack it used to.

They also keep the weight down on the delivery flight so it can comfortably make it all the way. So fewer/ no pax or luggage

I can't imagine the likes of Boeing or Airbus being too thrilled with airlines 'selling' seats on these private flights direct from the manufacturer's HQ, for a variety of reasons.

Here's a fun fact about Airbus delivery flights, though: airlines are now prohibited from filling up their delivery aircraft with wine as cargo. Apparently lots of airlines used to do this (particularly those that don't have regular flights to France, given the reduced cost of flying cargo on the airline's own plane, and the cost savings of buying French wine in France), but it became so popular that these huge shipments of wine began to impact on delivery times as the loading and security process was taking too long, so Airbus put a stop to it, citing that their priority was to get the aircraft off to the customer in good time, not to have their private terminal used as a cargo bay, haha!

(So, anything that adds unnecessary weight or time to a delivery flight isn't going to go down well with the manufacturers, not to mention that the airline would need traffic rights to carry commercial passengers on the route, and so on.)

There may also be accreditation issues by local regulators to make sure the plane is up to scratch and approved to take fee paying passengers.

Many years back I had a relative come to Syd on a brand new 747-400. So it has been done. QF had a ridiculous return fare at the time. I just don't recall if it was ex Boeing or LA or SF.

I suspect they may lease a couple of A330s to plug the gap pending a 787-10 order to replace them all from 2022.

Great idea - but not sure how it would go with CASA? I suspect that it would be more a regulatory hurdle.