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Oh damn, it’s one of those weeks.
The weeks where Sam is kinda busy so he writes an aviation related script for HAI because
they’re pretty easy and usually do well.
Well, the question of the day is this: what’s the longest possible commercial flight?
By that I don’t mean what’s the current longest flight.
The answer to that is easy.
It’s SQ21—the nonstop Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Newark, New Jersey.
In just nineteen hours, this flight will take you from the best airport in the world to
the worst.
You see, what I want to figure out is, in some idillic future without death, illness,
Newark Airport, or airplane range restrictions, what would be the longest pair of airports
that could feasibly be connected by non-stop commercial flights.
To do that, what we have to look for are two airports that are antipodes—diametrically
opposite to each other on the globe.
Although they’re rarer than an on-time flight at Newark, it turns out these do exist—this
could be a short episode.
Tangier, Morocco’s airport is exact opposite the airport of Whangarei, New Zealand.
A flight between these two airports would cross 12,500 miles or 20,000 kilometers over
about 22 hours.
Case closed… and look at that.
We have four whole minutes left to talk to you about the sponsor.
Except, there’s a problem.
Whangarei’s runway is quite short—shorter than the average Newark Airport customer service
agent’s temper.
At only 3,600 feet or 1,100 meters long, not even a small regional jet like a CRJ 700 could
land there.
Only prop planes operate at Whangarei meaning, unless some wild aircraft designs are in the
works, no aircraft that could fly for 22 hours could land there.
There are, however, some nearly antipodal airports out there like Depati Amir Airport
in Indonesia and La Macarena Airport in Columbia, or Benito Salas Airport in Columbia and Sultan
Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in Indonesia—turns out there are a lot of
antipodes between these two countries.
Here’s the thing, though: basically nobody wants to travel between Indonesia and Columbia.
It’s not that either are bad countries—it’s just that, for the average Indonesian, flying
24 hours to Columbia isn’t at the top of their bucket list.
Realistically, there would never be a nonstop flight between the two countries, no matter
the technical abilities of aircraft, because there just wouldn’t be the demand.
While hypothetically a route between these two nearly antipodal airports could occur,
so could Guy Fieri being crowned the next Queen of England.
In reality, though, neither of these things would practically happen, so to properly answer
our question, we need a route with adequate demand to fill big planes.
It turns out that passenger airlines need passengers to make money, so figuring out
where demand is is a hugely important job in the airline industry.
If an airline can figure out a new route people want to fly, they’re in for a lot of money,
so there are loads of data out there on passenger demand.
Looking at these data, some of the really obvious super-long routes that people fly
a lot are from the UK to Australia because, you know, empire.
Roughly 2.2 million people fly between the two counties yearly making it a huge market
but, with the exception of one non-stop flight between London and Perth, all of these routes
are indirect.
More than half a million people fly between London and Sydney alone each year, representing
seven Dreamliners worth per day.
Qantas intends to start flying this route nonstop once aircraft range allows, however,
it’s only a measly 10,500 miles or 17,000 kilometers.
The two cities are far from antipodal.
Surely we can do better.
First of all, don’t call me Shirley, secondly, it turns out, we can.
For one, there’s certainly the demand for a nonstop London to Auckland flight which,
at 11,400 miles or 18,350 kilometers, is not far from antipodal, but a longer city pair
is possible if we just look at some less obvious places.
This is Brazil.
When you think of Brazil, you probably think of all of the stuff it’s got going for it
like having the Amazon Rainforest, having the Christ the Redeemer Statue, and not having
Newark Airport.
What you probably don’t think of, though, is Brazil being home to a lot of Asians but,
as it turns out, there are an estimated 3 million people in the country with primarily
Asian ancestry.
Of those, about half are Japanese.
Therefore, there’s demand for about 57,000 seats a year between Tokyo Narita Airport
and Sao Paulo, which would be plenty enough to keep a flight afloat, even though 11,490
miles or 18,490 kilometers separate the airports.
Such a flight is not technically possible right now, but if it were, it would take nearly
21 hours in the air.
Only a few hundred miles away from perfectly antipodal, surely this is the longest possible
route out there… but we can do ever so slightly better.
You see, in addition to all the Japanese in Brazil, there’s a sizable, albeit smaller,
diaspora of Chinese.
Roughly 200,000 people of Chinese ancestry live in Sao Paulo alone, which leads to a
similar annual flight demand to Shanghai of 53,000 passengers—presumably propped up
by strong tourism demand as well.
This route, just 26 miles or 42 kilometers longer, could reasonably exist, when aircraft
with that kind of range are developed.
Despite all this rather strong demand between Asia and South America, there are, in fact,
no nonstop flights between the two continents.
While some points on the two continents are close enough for a flight, overall, there
just isn’t the demand and that makes South America and Asia the only two inhabited continents
on earth to not be connected by nonstop flights.
Nonetheless, the demand could be there for nonstop flights in the future, and so we’re
going to call this the longest possible non-stop flight in the world, until some YouTube commenter
tells me why I’m wrong.
What you could also use to tell me why I’m wrong is my custom email set up through Hover:
spam@halfasinteresting.com.
I set that up so I look professional rather than using a boring, generic email like halfasinterestingspam@gmail.com.
Having this email only costs $20 a year, which I consider well worth it so that, when you
send me things that I’ll never read, you’re given the best impression.
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