Singapore Airlines is relaunching the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight.
According to the BBC, Singapore Airlines is relaunching their Singapore-to-New York service, which is the world’s longest non-stop flight.
Taking 19 hours to cover over 15,000km (more than 9500 miles), the flight tops Qatar’s 17.5 hour service between Auckland and Doha.
Australian airline Qantas launched a 17 hour non-stop service from Perth to London earlier this year.
The service from Changi Airport to Newark was withdrawn five years ago because it was too expensive to run. Now, the Singaporean airline feels confident in the demand for its new service.
Twin engined Airbus SE 350-900ULRs will operate the service, fitted with 161 seats – 67 business class seats and 94 premium economy seats. No economy seats are offered.
According to the airline, all business seats for the inaugural flight, which takes off today, have been fully booked. There were “a very limited number” of premium economy seats remaining.
“The thinking behind that is that they are selling a premium product – it’s for the top end of town,” says aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, who will be on board Thursday’s flight.
“This is a route between two massive financial hubs, and so they will fill this plane up with business people, or well-heeled travellers who want the convenience of a non stop flight.”
“It’s also been proven that when carriers introduce a new non-stop route, the traffic on that route increases threefold.”
