World of Aviation: Long Line

The world’s longest flight is Singapore Airlines SQ21 between Newark, across the Hudson from New York, and Changi, its hub in its eponymous city-state, a distance in great circle terms of 8,285 nautical miles.

On this route SQ uses the Airbus A350-900ULR – for ultra long-range – a version of the regular A350 with extra fuel tanks and correspondingly higher maximum takeoff weight. It is timetabled at some 18h 30m, though according to data from FlightRadar24, over the month of September most flights took somewhere between 17 and 18 hours with only two flights taking more than 18. Stronger northern hemisphere winter winds, however, can bring the flight under the 17-hour mark on a regular basis, no matter which way around the world its pilots choose to fly.

As ever, the changes with the greatest impacts are those coming behind the shockwave

But in the same way as Qantas’s Project Sunrise flights from Australia’s east coast to London and New York would be ground-breaking in their novelty, in this generation of aircraft at least these 18-plus hour flights can only ever be the most niche of services.

But 16 hours is the new normal. As ever, the changes with the greatest impacts are those coming behind the shockwave, as the aircraft engineered to achieve these astounding nonstop distances are employed on everyday missions that would once have been themselves remarkable.

Singapore Airlines’ 7,013nm nonstop between Changi and Seattle-Tacoma, for example, is timetabled at nearly 17 hours and uses a stock-standard Airbus A350-900 – and went largely unremarked on by the world’s press. It’s just another long flight at this point. Qantas will start Brisbane-Chicago in April 2020, just behind Perth-London at some 7,735nm in distance, and is likely to see the same response.

As with the Sydney-Dallas/Fort Worth flight, though, a key part of the market here is connections via codeshare partner American Airlines at its Chicago O’Hare hub. Since your average passenger would probably prefer to both reduce flight time and fly Qantas over American for more of their journey, the crux here is that this is a Brisbane flight. Passengers who can cut a connection at Sydney, or avoid the longer domestic US leg to LA for other Brisbane flights, are likely to be very pleased with their options.

But this will be a test for Qantas: a significant proportion of the high load factor on its Perth-London flights are passengers connecting from Melbourne on its previous leg. As ever with ultra long-haul flying, the crucial question is whether these flights can sustain the same yields if this sort of load factor demand doesn’t materialise.

In ultra long-haul flying, ’twas ever thus.

A new generation of aircraft have moved ultra long-haul
flying into the mainstream
Aviation has always sought to fly farther, and from the very start of the jet age specialist aircraft such as the 747SP started pushing those boundaries and reducing the numbers of hops any proverbial winged kangaroo needed to take.

In early 2001, what we would now think of as ultra long-haul travel really arrived, with Continental Airlines and its future merger partner United Airlines launching flights from New York airports Newark and JFK to Hong Kong within days of each other, exceeding 16 hours in the air in the too-short halcyon summer just after the turn of the millennium and before the paradigm-shifting events of September 11.

In the 2000s, the arrival of the re-engined Boeing 777-200LR and the Airbus A340-500 meant that ultra long-haul flying was not just possible, but economic in some cases. Indeed, 2005’s Boeing “Worldliner”, the long-range version of its 777, still operates two of the world’s top 10 longest flights.

But the shift from aircraft being largely metal tubes to being primarily constructed from carbon fibre reinforced polymer – known as CFRP, and generally referred to as composites within the airline context – has meant that recent airliners are markedly lighter and more fuel efficient.

The Airbus A350 XWB and Boeing 787 Dreamliner are both about 50 per cent composite, with the A350 a few percentage points more “plastic fantastic” than the 787.

That’s an increase in composite materials from some 25 per cent in the A380 of the previous decade.

Composites are something of a holy grail for aviation: their higher strength to weight ratio means they are lighter in performing the same application, more resistant to fatigue or corrosion, allow larger structures and – crucially for passengers – allow higher cabin humidity and a pressurisation to the equivalent of 6,000 feet rather than 8,000 feet. These two environmental factors reduce tiredness and jetlag to an extent that is becoming increasingly noticeable, not necessarily in its presence on the 787 or A350, but in its absence on other aircraft.

Figures on efficiency gains compared with previous generation aircraft are always complex, not least because airframers have an incentive to compare oranges with apples, or at least slightly more worm-pocked and mushy apples with the very shiniest of organic hand-grown ones.

But the usual comparison Airbus uses between an A350-1000 and a Boeing 777-300ER is something around 25 per cent in terms of fuel burn, carbon emissions, and operating cost. The A350 is, of course, a slightly smaller aircraft, but the 787 was supposed to be around 20 per cent more efficient than the 767 it replaced, so this feels like a reasonable sort of ballpark figure.

Even so, it’s interesting to note that only six of the world’s 10 longest flights are flown on the A350 (which has four of them) and 787 (which has three, because both fly between San Francisco and Singapore).

The remainder are the fruits of early 2000s technology: the Boeing 777-200LR, updated from the mid-1990s widebody twinjet, and the Airbus A380.

The world’s longest flight, slinging between Singapore and New York, was previously flown using an Airbus A340-500 during the period between 2004–2013, before its relaunch in October last year.

Then, as now, the service débuted with a premium economy section behind business class (then named “executive economy”), before turning into an all-business-class aircraft. Now, with more and more ultra long-haul flights, the expectations of the passenger experience onboard is changing too.

The crucial question is whether these flights can sustain the same yields

As ultra long-haul is evolving, so is what
passengers find on board
As a rule, you’ll find the same passenger experience on ultra long-haul aircraft as you will on a regular long-haul flight.

Qantas has made much Project Sunrise public relations hay in its widely covered pronouncements about everything from underfloor gyms to sleeping berths, but as the real world wheat is sorted from the possibility chaff it’s likely that the aircraft will look much like what we see today, with perhaps a bit more convertible space around the doors for standup bars, self-service zones, and even stretching areas.

Indeed, only Singapore Airlines has an ultra long-haul version of its aircraft for ultra long-haul flights, with no economy class seating on its A350-900ULRs. Everyone else, from number two down the longest-flight list, offers their regular mix of seating from the list of first, business, premium economy, extra-legroom economy and regular economy seats, if perhaps in a different mix in a subfleet, like Air New Zealand’s 787s.

What’s interesting, though, is how many of these ultra long-haul aircraft don’t have ultra-comfortable seats, especially in economy.

This is largely a function of the number of Boeing 787 and 777 aircraft in the list: the ultra-narrow nine-abreast 787 seating and ten-abreast 777 seating that is standard on both these aircraft (with the exception of Delta in the top 10 list) means that the experience on some of the world’s longest routes is some of the most cramped.

Further forward, premium economy is the same as usual, as is the business class product: The Singapore Airlines A350s all have the same seats, Qatar’s 777s are in the final stages of being upgraded to the Qsuites, Qantas’s 787 seat is fundamentally the same as its A330 seat, and so on. Indeed, Qantas’s A380, United’s 787-9, and the remaining older Delta 777-200LR seats are over a decade old at this point: not exactly the latest product one imagines on the world’s longest flights.

This reveals, fundamentally, one of the ongoing problems with commercial aviation and particularly with business class, which is the absolute lifeblood of the ultra long-haul travel experience: consistency and honesty when setting expectations.

As just one example, United Airlines has been branding its business class as Polaris for some three and a half years, with the promise of new seating with direct aisle access, but hasn’t even started the refurbishment process on the 787-9 Dreamliners that operate its longest routes. The end result: “Fauxlaris”, the ex-Continental seat from the mid-2000s with the new service, including the mountain of bedding without a stowage option on the old seats.

At the very pointiest end, meanwhile, first class is only found on two of the world’s 10 longest flights: the Emirates A380 from Auckland to Dubai and the Qantas superjumbo from Dallas/Fort Worth to Sydney. As this kind of travel flies off into the sunset, business class is gaining many of its attributes: from doors to lounges and increasingly upmarket services.

It’s likely that the aircraft will look much like what we see today, with perhaps a bit more convertible space

Globally, ultra long-haul is changing the shape of aviation
Today, ultra long-haul flying is something of an American adventure. Seven out of the 10 longest flights in the world either depart from or arrive into the United States. Numbers 11 to 14 are to and from Los Angeles alone, with Emirates from Dubai on an A380, Etihad from Abu Dhabi on a 777-300ER, Qatar Airways on a 777-200LR, and Saudia from Jeddah on a 777-300ER, respectively.

The remainder of the top 20 are also North American-focused: Toronto-Manila (PAL, A350-900), Vancouver-Melbourne (Air Canada, 787-9), Chicago-Auckland (Air New Zealand, 787-9), Dubai-Houston (Emirates, A380), Washington DC-Hong Kong (Cathay Pacific, A350-1000), and Dallas/Fort Worth-Hong Kong (American Airlines, 777-300ER).

And the last 10 in the top 30, starting with Dubai-San Francisco (Emirates, A380) and ending with Johannesburg-New York JFK (South African Airways, A340-600) all also either originate or terminate in North America.

Certainly, the dominance of the United States in aviation is nothing new. But one of the interesting green shoots of change is the Aeroméxico flight from Shanghai to Mexico City, which uses a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner. The airport in the hot-and-high Mexican capital sits at 2,238m of altitude, some 7,343 feet, which means that the aircraft cannot make the nonstop in the other direction, and stops after a brief domestic leg at Tijuana, immediately to the south of the US border with California.

Crucially, this allows passengers from Asia to avoid stopping in the United States or Canada in trans-Pacific transit to Latin America. With geopolitical and trade tensions ratcheting up across the Pacific, and transiting via the United States being a miserable experience as a rule, especially for non-US passport holders, this option is particularly attractive for a growing range of passengers of certain nationalities.

The growth in ultra long-haul flying, and indeed the growing efficiency of widebody aircraft as a whole, has also led to a reduction in intermediate hub traffic, especially for the yields related to premium cabin traffic.

As recently as 10 or 20 years ago, airports such as Tokyo Narita, Taipei Taiyuan and Seoul Incheon were key stopovers on bread-and-butter business flights across the Pacific.

For some airlines, they still are: in addition to its Airbus A350-900 (both ULR and regular non-ULR) nonstops from Singapore to Los Angeles and San Francisco, Singapore Airlines operates stopping services via Tokyo Narita and Hong Kong, respectively, with Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-300ER aircraft. It does the same with the A380 it still flies to JFK via Frankfurt alongside the nonstop A350-900ULR.

But with the US carriers’ Asian hubs either going or gone, the direction of travel is clear.

Fundamentally, the future is a growth in ultra long-haul flights, together with the number of flights within the higher ends of regular long-haul – and indeed the definition of long-haul itself, as the aircraft we use for these flights continue to develop.

Despite major uncertainties, we have only started to scratch the surface of ultra long-haul travel
Every decade, it seems that a new set of longer-range aircraft redefines long-haul and ultra long-haul flying.

As the Airbus A340 and Boeing 777 changed the game in the 1990s, so did their re-engined long-range versions in the Airbus A340-500 and Boeing 777-200LR in the 2000s.

The early-2000s development of the Boeing 787 and the late-2000s’ Airbus A350 did the same, and now around a decade later the extended and longer-range versions of these aircraft – and indeed another generation of the now-venerable 777 – are again pushing forward.

Airbus is offering an increased maximum takeoff weight for the A350-1000 as part of its bid for Qantas’s Project Sunrise. Boeing’s 777-8X has been formally delayed alongside its larger -9X sibling, and has underwhelmed in orders with just two customers, Emirates and Qatar Airways, amid fierce competition from Airbus’s A350-900 and -1000 on the ultra long-haul side. Meanwhile, Boeing has provided a maximum takeoff weight option for its 787-10 as part of a deal to win Air New Zealand’s order earlier this year for eight-aircraft with an option for a further 20 in what is, essentially, a 787-10ER variant of the stretched Dreamliner.

Airbus’s A330neo, too, offers a longer-range version: the slow-selling A330-800neo offers 8,150nm in the smaller A330-200-sized aircraft, while the more popular A330-900neo stretches to a creditable 7,200nm.

But at its most basic level, the constraint on ultra long-haul flying is fuel. Despite the fact that airliners use more fuel per kilometre on takeoff than in cruise, the fuel consumption curve starts bending unsustainably upwards the longer an aircraft flies.

In essence, the problem is burning fuel to carry fuel, and fuel is not only expensive but volatile in price. At a time when instability worldwide is growing, and when aircraft are an increasingly expensive capital investment, there is an inherent constraint on airlines purchasing ultra long-haul-specific aircraft – and thus on manufacturers producing them.

Where will the future lead? Eventually, suborbital commercial spaceflight seems more likely than supersonic daughter-of-Concorde developments from where we now stand. In the meantime, the trajectory of aircraft development suggests that many readers of this, World of Aviation’s first issue, will be able to fly for 24 hours nonstop in regular commercial air service during their lifetime.

Now that’s ultra long-haul.
Long-haul game-changer: the A340 of the 90s and early 2000s. Now for the next generation.
ROB FINLAYSON