The world's longest flights, and what 18 hours in the air actually feels like

There is a particular kind of tiredness that only exists above 38,000 feet. It arrives somewhere around hour eleven, after the second meal service and before the cabin lights come back up, and it is not quite sleepiness. It is the feeling of having been in one place, motionless, for longer than a body expects to be anywhere.

The people who fly the world's longest routes know it well. And there are more of those routes every year.

The current ranking

Measured by great circle distance — the shortest path between two points on a sphere, which is what aircraft actually fly — the longest scheduled non-stop services are:

1. Singapore – New York (JFK) — about 15,350 km, roughly 18 hours 40 minutes eastbound
2. Singapore – Newark — about 15,340 km, the route that started the modern ultra-long-haul era
3. Auckland – Doha — about 14,530 km, nearly 18 hours
4. Perth – London — about 14,500 km, the first non-stop between Australia and Europe
5. Dallas/Fort Worth – Melbourne — about 14,470 km

The ordering shifts as airlines add and drop services, but the shape of the list is stable: a handful of carriers with the right aircraft, connecting cities that have enough premium demand to justify flying a lightly loaded jet a very long way.

Why these routes exist

An ultra-long-haul flight is an expensive proposition. Fuel weighs a great deal, and carrying enough of it to fly for nineteen hours means carrying less of everything else — fewer passengers, almost no cargo. The economics only work when the seats you do sell are worth a lot.

That is why the Singapore–Newark service originally launched as an all-business-class configuration, and why today's version still devotes most of the cabin to premium seats. The aircraft that made it viable — the Airbus A350-900ULR and the Boeing 787-9 — are not faster than their predecessors. They are simply more efficient, which on a route this long is the only thing that matters.

What the distance does to a logbook

Here is the thing about ultra-long-haul that people underestimate: a single one of these flights is worth an enormous amount of distance.

One Singapore–New York return is 30,700 km. That is more than three-quarters of the way around the Earth, in two flights, over about two days of your life. Someone who does that route four times a year has flown further than most people manage in a decade.

This is exactly the sort of thing that becomes visible only when you write it down. Orbit awards its Ultra long badge for any single leg over 12,000 km, and its Around Earth badge at 40,075 km cumulative — the Earth's equatorial circumference. Two return trips on this route and you have both.

If you've never counted, the number is almost always larger than you'd guess. We wrote about how to work out how many times around the Earth you've flown if you want to run the sum yourself.

Surviving one

There is no trick, but there are things that help:

• Set your watch to the destination before you board. Not when you land — before you board. Every decision about when to sleep follows from it.
• Eat on the destination's schedule, not the cabin crew's. The meal service is timed for the aircraft, not for you. Skipping one is allowed.
• Get up every two hours. Not for circulation advice reasons alone, but because the flight is psychologically shorter as a series of segments than as one block.
• Pick your seat for light, not legroom. On a nineteen-hour eastbound flight the window shade is a more consequential decision than four extra centimetres of pitch.

The routes that aren't there yet

Sydney to London non-stop — about 17,000 km — remains the industry's white whale. Project Sunrise, Qantas's long-running effort to fly it, has been repeatedly delayed and repeatedly revived, and would run around twenty hours.

When it launches, it will be the single most productive flight in the world for anyone keeping a logbook. One return trip would be 34,000 km — 85% of the way around the planet, in two sittings.

Worth logging.

Orbit calculates the great circle distance of every flight you add, automatically, from an airport database that works without signal. Download now and see where your own number lands.