What Are First, Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Freedom Flights?

You should check out this guys other videos on aviation, low cost carrier fare explanations. All pretty interesting. His videos on TWL (that Wikipedia list) are also fascinating!

Foreigners can book Qantas from NY to LA. But Americans cannot. Likewise Americans can book and fly Qantas from Brisbane to Sydney. There is asymmetry in some of these freedoms. For instance Europeans can book and fly United from London to Frankfurt, but British or Air France cannot fly from NY to LA. So it seems that the US is imposing some rather unfair practices here. Then again, who would ever fly trans-con on United if you could choose Singapore or Emirates?

While there are limitations, the QF LAX-JFK segment is less restrictive than what many of you are intimating. The flight needs to be flown as part of an international itinerary. The international part of the journey need not be on QF or even on the same day. For example, you could fly JL NRT-LAX / layover / QF LAX-JFK and be fine. AA agents are hit or miss, but I've never had a problem booking itineraries like this via QF. The trick to really maximize this is you need to be on a published fare that allows a stopover. In theory, your stopover could be a few months!

Great video explanation, but did you notice the typo on the 4th freedom? -David

Really interesting video, thanks for the link! It's not possible to book just JFK-LAX on Qantas, although I believe you can fly a different Qantas flight on the Australia-LAX leg and connect to/from the LAX-JFK "tag". It looks like there's a change of aircraft at LAX these days, it's a 747 from JFK to LAX, then an A380 from LAX to SYD. Back when I flew it, it was the same 747 for both legs, although after the JFK-LAX leg you had to get off while the plane was refueled, which was an absolute pain in the butt because the gate area in T4 wasn't nearly big enough. I remember the idea of allowing American (but not Qantas) to sell the LAX-JFK leg separately by AA buying the seats from QF was floated at least a couple of times, but the FAA wasn't having it. It wouldn't have been that big of a money-maker for QF anyway, since any seat sold on LAX-JFK wouldn't be available for sale to a SYD-JFK passenger, so it'd probably have been restricted to last-minute sales. Sort of like the way, back when dinosaurs (or tri-jets, at least) roamed the earth, you used to be able to get super-cheap seats from LAS to LAX on Hawaiian (DC-10, IIRC) so they could get a little more revenue out of an otherwise-empty seat that they'd already sold between LAX and HNL.