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17 years ago, an aviation frontier was broken.
Just before noon on March 1, 2001 a Continental Airlines 777 lifted off from frosty Newark
Airport across the river from New York City.
It tracked north over the US, then Canada, then just kept flying north until north became
south.
It flew south over Russia, then Mongolia, then mainland China before setting down at
Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong after 16 hours.
With that, there was a new longest flight in the world.
The two cities had never before been connected by non-stop commercial flights.
This was at the time a momentous achievement—all the business travelers making frequent trips
between the two financial centers badly wanted this quicker flight—but you may be surprised
that such a flight was an achievement so recently.
Nowadays, non-stop New York to Hong Kong flights are far from exceptional.
Five planes carrying more than 1,000 passengers total fly non-stop daily between the two cities
and nowadays, this route doesn’t even crack the list of the top 20 longest flights in
the world.
Especially in the past three years, there’s been a noticeable and dramatic rise in the
number of ultra-long haul flights.
Among the ten longest non-stop flights, the one on this list that’s existed the longest,
since 2009, is Delta’s daily service from Johannesburg to Atlanta—the only flight
by an American airline to South Africa.
In 2016 United started non-stop flights between San Francisco and Singapore—ending an era
during which there were no non-stop connections between the two countries.
Just recently in October, 2018 Philippine Airlines began flying from Manila to New York
non-stop on their new a350.
In 2014, Qantas starting flying non-stop in both directions from Sydney to Dallas—then
the longest flight in the world.
In early 2018 United added another connection to down under with their route from Houston
to Sydney.
Singapore Airlines added another US connection in November 2018 flying to Los Angeles and
Emirates has operated the longest nonstop a380 flight in the world from Dubai to Auckland
since 2016.
Qantas started the first and currently only non-stop connection between Australia and
Europe in March, 2018 with their daily dreamliner service from Perth to London and Qatar operates
what was until recently the longest non-stop flight from Doha all the way to Auckland.
Lastly, the longest flight in the world, confidently beating the runner up by over 500 miles, is
the newly launched daily Singapore Airlines flight between Singapore and Newark clocking
in at 9,534 miles and up to 19 hours of flight time depending on winds.
Eight of the ten flights on this list were launched in the past three years.
While it can be expected that as technology advances airplane range will get longer, there’s
been a noticeable acceleration in the addition of non-stop routes between earth’s furthest
city pairs.
Like any phenomenon, this has causes and effects.
One factor driving this surge in ultra-long haul flights is the release of two new planes
in the past decade—the a350 and 787.
Six of the ten longest routes are flown by one of these two planes.
Now, planes have existed before that could fly the routes these fly but they weren’t
as economical.
Singapore Airlines previously flew the world’s longest flight from Singapore to Newark from
2004 until 2014 on the a340 but its high fuel consumption forced them to cancel the route
as soon as oil prices ticked up.
To fly fewer passengers a shorter maximum distance, an a340 uses 35% more fuel than
the a350.
Economics is everything with the world’s longest routes.
The truth is that flying a non-stop flight from Singapore to New York uses more fuel
than flying a stopping service from Singapore to Tokyo to New York.
Now, this might seem counterintuitive since planes use far more fuel per minute taking
off than they do in cruise and flying nonstop requires one take off instead of two but that's
failing to consider that it uses fuel to carry fuel.
With a 777-200, for example, flying 800 nautical miles will use about 30.6 pounds of fuel per
mile.
That pounds per mile average decreases up until reaching a total flight distance of
about 3,000 nautical miles.
Beyond that, the pound per mile figure increases up until 8,000 nautical miles where the aircraft
would burn 32.2 pounds of fuel per mile flown.
This is because eventually, the added burn from flying the extra fuel needed to fly long
distance overtakes the extra fuel used to take off.
That means that, with this aircraft, which is used to fly the daily 8,000 mile Qatar
flight between Doha and Houston, it would be more efficient on a fuel consumption basis
to fly something like Doha to Paris, Paris to Halifax, and Halifax to Houston rather
than flying the whole trip in one go.
This is part of the reason why cargo airlines rarely fly ultra-long haul routes.
While UPS has plenty enough cargo to support a non-stop flight between their Louisville
and Hong Kong hubs and the aircraft that could fly it in one go, they fly the route with
a stop in Anchorage partially for fuel saving reasons.
Of course, any time on the ground is time that an aircraft could be in the air making
money so that degrades the savings and that’s part of why cargo airlines don’t only fly
in 3,000 mile hops.
Time matters for cargo airlines but not nearly as much as it does for passenger airlines.
Passenger airlines have to deal with people which are far more sensitive to a few extra
hours of travel time than boxes.
Non-stop flights are typically more desirable especially to the business traveller which
is why airlines will price connecting itineraries typically higher than non-stop ones even on
short routes where the cost to the airline of operating a connecting itinerary is higher
than that of a non-stop flight.
With higher costs, airlines therefore need to justify operating non-stop flights instead
of stopping ones.
Singapore airlines does operate another flight to New York via Frankfurt with a far larger
a380 but the non-stop flight is primarily operated to appeal to the business traveller
who can pay more.
Often, the routes with enough demand to support ultra long-haul flights are the ones with
high business traffic between big, wealthy cities like Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong,
London, and New York.
Even though Hawaii, for example, is one of the top vacation destinations in the world,
you just don’t see many long-haul flights to it from places like London because leisure
travelers are more sensitive to price and they’d rather pay less to fly via Los Angeles
rather than on a non-stop from London for more.
For this reason, on the a350’s Singapore Airlines uses to fly to Newark, they didn’t
even bother including an economy class, the kind that leisure travelers tend to book.
They only have premium economy and business class.
With the lower weight from fewer bags, seats, and passengers the plane can fly more efficiently
to the other side of the world and, from the airlines perspective, they’re not loosing
out on much since, at the prices they would have to sell economy seats at to be competitive,
they really wouldn’t be making much money anyways.
The higher margins of premium classes give them a better shot of breaking even on this
flight.
Of course, the other factor contributing to the rise of these ultra-long haul flights
is the low cost of fuel.
Jet fuel prices halved in 2015 and bottomed out at a cost of only 85 cents per gallon
in January 2016.
Since then prices have steadily risen leading some to question whether troubled times were
ahead for the industry but prices again took a dive in October 2018.
Overall, over the past four years, prices are lower than ever and with that fuel represents
a smaller proportion of an airline’s cost so it’s proportionally cheaper to fly longer
distances.
This fluctuation in fuel cost has also contributed to the rise, and in some cases fall, of long
haul budget airlines such as Norwegian Airlines, Wow Air, and Primera Air.
So we’ve established the causes of this proliferation of ultra-long flights but what
are its effects?
One of the busiest long distance flows of passengers is from Europe to Australia and
New Zealand and vice versa.
As two areas with close cultural and business connections plenty of people travel between
them despite it taking about 24 hours each way.
Before the turn of the century almost every major European Airline flew to Australia via
some stopping point like Bangkok, Singapore, or Hong Kong including Air France, KLM, Lufthansa,
Alitalia, and British Airways—some with multiple daily flights.
Today, though, there is only one sole flight by a European Airlines to Australia—British
Airways’ once daily flight from London to Singapore to Sydney.
Meanwhile, Qantas is the only Australian Airline and Air New Zealand the only Kiwi airline
to operate services all the way to Europe.
All the airlines on each end have lost market share to those in between—the Asian airlines.
In the past few decades airlines like Emirates and Singapore Airlines have become the most
popular for those traveling between the two areas as, if you were to fly British Airways
you would have to start in Sydney and end in London.
Flying on Emirates, on the other hand, you can start at any of their six non-stop destinations
in Australia and New Zealand, connect via Dubai, and end up at any of their dozens of
European destinations with one stop.
It’s just faster and often cheaper and so, while British Airways operates seven weekly
flights to Australia, Emirates operates 84 and Singapore 137.
Both of these airlines and more including Cathay Pacific, Etihad, and Qatar Airways
have become experts in operating connecting flights between Europe and Australasia.
But the reason they’re able to do this is because you have to stop on these routes anyways—it’s
too far for non-stop flights.
Or rather, it used to be.
Since March, 2018, number three on that list of longest flights is Qantas’ new non-stop
flight from Perth to London.
Many were skeptical when this flight launched that customers would prefer it to a one-stop
option where they could pay less and stretch their legs halfway through their trip but
the data proves otherwise.
Since launch, 92% of available seats on this route have been sold.
This is an exceptionally good load factor, as its called, as Qantas’ average load factor
for international flights is only 84%.
For this reason Qantas is strongly considering launching other non-stop European routes from
Perth to Paris and Frankfurt.
In addition, other airlines are looking at starting new non-stop routes from Europe to
Australia.
Founder Richard Branson has said that Virgin Atlantic is looking to start non-stop flights
from London to Perth, “as soon as possible.”
Turkish Airlines, based in Istanbul, is technically still a European Airline, even if it’s just
miles from the border with Asia, and it’s set to become to first airline to start flying
non-stop from Europe to Sydney if it follows through with its announced plans to launch
these flights in 2019 with its new 787 dreamliners.
While the once daily Qantas flight is doing little to cut into the Asian carrier’s profits
right now, if more and more flights start bypassing the Asian hubs, the major connecting
airlines could be given a run for their money.
Meanwhile, the race is on to see who will start flying what is perhaps the most valuable
route in the world that doesn’t yet have a non-stop connection—Sydney to London.
Chance are the first will be Qantas.
A number of years ago, Qantas challenged aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus to create
a plane that could fly the 21 hour non-stop flight fully loaded all the way to London.
The manufacturers are close to delivering and Qantas has said they will make their decision
between the Airbus a350-1000ULR or Boeing 777-8 by the end of 2019.
From there, flights would start in 2022 or 2023 not only on the Sydney to London route,
but also potentially from Melbourne and Brisbane and to New York and Paris.
Being the airline of choice for Australians, perhaps no airline globally has a better shot
at making a 21 hour non-stop flight work than Qantas.
With the arrival of the newest set of planes, airlines can now fly as far as 11,000 miles
non-stop.
That means that nearly every populated point on earth can feasibly be connected by non-stop
flights.
With more technological advancements on their way, absolutely every point on earth will
soon be reachable non-stop.
What that means is that the only factors now restricting the development of ultra-long
haul flights are economic, not technological.
In many ways, the question of whether this trend of the proliferation of ultra-long hauls
is up to the mercy of fuel prices.
If they stay low, we’ll have more and more 18, 19, or 20 hour flights while if they go
up, you can be sure that airlines will cancel these routes in droves.
While the planes are not flying any faster, they’re getting passengers to their destination
in less time so these new non-stop routes to the other side of the world are helping
to make the world just a little bit smaller, one flight at a time.
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Also, on my other channel, Half as Interesting, I just released a video on the longest duration
non-stop flight to ever exist—the 32 hour flight Qantas flew from Perth to Sri Lanka
during WWII in order to reconnect the empire.
Click the annotation on-screen to check that out and I’ll see you again in two weeks
with another Wendover Productions video.