The first non-stop scheduled flight between Australia and the UK has touched down in London’s Heathrow Airport. This brand-new historic Qantas flight on a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner of 14,498km (9,009 mile) from Perth to London took just over 17 hours. To maximise the comfort for the passengers on such a long flight, the plane is equipped with features that provides lower cabin noise and improved air quality.
The Quantas Chief Executive, Alan Joyce, talked about this as a new “game-changing” service between Australia and the UK, originally known as the “kangaroo route”, because it had once taken four days and involved seven stops.
The new direct Perth-London flight is around three hours quicker than other non-stop routes that need touchdowns in the Middle East to refuel or even change planes.
However, the new non-stop Perth-London flight is not the world’s longest. It’s the second-longest after the Qatar Airways’ flight from Doha to Auckland, which is 14,529km.
And there are other carriers, including Emirates and United Airlines, that have also made non-stop journeys longer than 14,000km.
It was back in 2017 that United Airlines started flying from Los Angeles to Singapore, offering the longest-distance non-stop flight from America.
But even further back it was Singapore Airlines that offered the world’s longest flight, flying more than 15,300km on a direct route from Singapore to New York. It was discontinued in 2013.
Leave a Reply