The 81-year-old agreement that can get you cheaper business class flights

For travellers sitting on a pile of Qantas points, one of the best deals around has been flying Emirates business class between Sydney and Christchurch. Listed on the Qantas website as EK412, the three-hour flight is aboard an A380, the goddess of the skies, and business class flyers get the acclaimed seat, service and style of one of the world’s finest airlines.

At present, that business class seat costs the same number of Qantas points as a return Sydney-Christchurch Qantas flight, where you’d be on a smaller Boeing 737 with its business class just a larger seat than economy with no lie-flat option. This hack won’t be as useful from March 31, when Qantas will require more points to book Classic Reward seats on Emirates.

But how is it that a Dubai-based carrier can pick up passengers in Australia and fly them to New Zealand, without having to pass through its home base? The answer is fifth freedom rights, one of the nine Freedoms of the Air rights codified in December 1944 under the Convention on International Civil Aviation, also known as the Chicago Convention.

Under standard aviation rules, airlines can sell flights only to or from their home country. But fifth freedom rights give a carrier the right to fly passengers between two foreign countries provided that the journey originates or ends in the carrier’s own country.

Without such rights, Qantas flight QF1, which operates from Sydney to London via Singapore, would not be able to pick up passengers in Singapore and fly them to London and back. Qantas has fifth freedom rights on that route, which allows it to sell return tickets between Singapore and London. Under fifth freedom rights, Ireland’s Aer Lingus can pick up passengers in Manchester, UK, and fly them to Orlando in the US; Singapore Airlines can fly passengers between Milan and Barcelona; Emirates can fly passengers from Milan to New York; and Ethiopian Airlines can pick up passengers in Seoul and fly them to Tokyo.

How do fifth freedom rights come about?

Fifth freedom rights are an agreement negotiated between the airline and the countries concerned. Naturally, countries are not enthusiastic about foreign airlines muscling in on their territory to the detriment of their own national carriers, and they’re not common. Turkish Airlines now operates flights to Australia from its home base in Istanbul via Kuala Lumpur. The airline would probably welcome the opportunity to sell tickets from Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne and Sydney, but that fifth freedom right has not been granted.

Australian Frequent Flyer has compiled an exhaustive list of existing routes with fifth-freedom rights. Note that Turkish Airlines has a fifth freedom right to fly passengers between Singapore and Melbourne but has not taken that up since it operates via Kuala Lumpur.

Do these rights benefit travellers?

Fifth freedom flights can be a win for travellers because the airline might find it difficult to fill seats on that sector of the flight and so price seats aggressively to fill them. That includes intra-European routes such as Ethiopian Airlines’ Stockholm-Oslo flight, or Aircalin’s Bangkok-Paris flights.

Another example is the Singapore Airlines flight between Frankfurt and New York. A return economy fare with Singapore Airlines on that route in March can cost as little as €441 ($736), which is about $60 less than Lufthansa charges for the same flight, but the big saving is for business flyers. For a return Frankfurt-New York ticket in March, the cheapest business class seat aboard the Singapore Airlines flight is €1241 ($2070) cheaper than the same seat aboard Lufthansa, and the Asian carrier’s business class is one of the world’s best. The same applies to reward seats – there is often greater availability on fifth freedom flights since they have more empty seats.

For the airline, fifth freedom flights boost revenue, optimise aircraft utilisation and expand their network without the requirement for additional long-haul aircraft. One example is Emirates flight EK412 from Dubai. That flight arrives in Sydney early in the morning and departs a few hours later for Christchurch. In the evening, the aircraft will turn around as flight EK413, return to Sydney and depart late in the evening for Dubai. As well as offering a two-stop service from Europe to Christchurch for New Zealand travellers, the airline also picks up Australians travelling across the ditch. A daily non-stop A380 service from Dubai to Christchurch would probably not make financial sense, but a service via Sydney ices the cake.

Fifth freedom rights also have implications for travellers wanting a stopover. Airlines transiting through a foreign country en route from their origin to their final destination cannot allow passengers to stopover at the transit point and board a following flight unless they have fifth freedom rights. A traveller from Australia looking for a Bangkok stopover would need to fly aboard Thai Airways since no airline operating non-stop flights between Australian cities and Bangkok has fifth freedom rights.

How to find fifth freedom flights

Got heaps of time? Because apart from Australian Frequent Flyer’s list, fifth freedom rights flights are about as elusive as great airport coffee. One way is to go to your favourite air travel search engine, key in your flight details as normal, select non-stop flights only and delete all the airlines that are based in the country where you want to fly from and the country you’re flying to. If there are any flights left, in all probability they will be fifth freedom flights.

I tried this using Skyscanner to find a flight from Frankfurt to New York and the search threw up two results. As well as the Singapore Airlines flight cited above, Brussels Airlines appeared. A deeper dig reveals that those Brussels Airlines are a codeshare, operated either by Lufthansa or United Airlines, so not actually a fifth freedom flight.

They may be scarce and difficult to track down, but fifth freedom flights offer wide-body cabins on short hops, cheaper fares and reward seats that haven’t yet vanished. If you find one, it’s a gold medal moment.