Why the Longest Nonstop Flights Are Ending

[marmar]

(Bloomberg Businessweek) Manpreet Gill, the Singapore-based head of fixed income, currencies, and commodities investment strategy at Standard Chartered’s (STAN:LN) wealth management unit, is preparing for a loss on one of his most valuable assets: his time. On Nov. 25, Singapore Airlines (SIA:SP) will stop its 100-passenger daily run from Singapore to Newark, N.J., the world’s longest nonstop commercial flight. After that, Singapore Air passengers such as Gill who are used to making the 19-hour slog in one sitting will have to fly to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport after a stop in Frankfurt—adding five hours to their journey. The carrier is stopping the all-business-class service on a four-engine Airbus A340-500 after ending the second-longest flight, from Los Angeles to the island city, on Oct. 22. The routes’ well-heeled flyers are not pleased. “The more time you add on the way,” says Gill, “the further it keeps you from either working or being at home.”

The demise of the two signature flights is the latest sign that the airline industry is putting profitability ahead of glamour. With oil prices tripling in the past decade, Singapore Air has struggled to ferry executives like Gill on the ultralong flights profitably for the past nine years. “The plane burns a lot of fuel but carries very few passengers,” says Siyi Lim, an analyst at OCBC Investment Research in Singapore. “It didn’t make sense to continue.”



The Newark service is more than 10,300 miles, while the Los Angeles flight was about 8,700 miles. The longest nonstop commercial flight by distance will now be Qantas Airways’ (QAN:AU) 8,575-mile flight from Sydney to Dallas, which uses a Boeing (BA) 747-400ER.

Scoring a boarding pass on the world’s longest flight doesn’t come cheap. A round-trip ticket in mid-October on the Singapore-Newark nonstop cost as much as S$13,400 ($10,850). Flights to JFK via Frankfurt are as much as S$10,700. Analysts say the nonstop price premium still wasn’t enough for an aircraft with so few seats. “With the current price of fuel,” says Brendan Sobie, chief analyst at CAPA Centre for Aviation in Singapore, “it’s virtually impossible to make money on ultralong-haul flights.” Singapore Air spokesman Nicholas Ionides says the airline doesn’t provide financials for its routes. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/fuel-costs-lead-singapore-air-to-end-worlds-longest-nonstop-flights?campaign_id=yhoo

[gopiscrap]

1. wow those are long.

The longest flight I was ever on was a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong non stop.
BTW landing at Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport was breath taking!

[marmar]

2. Was that the old airport where the flight path took planes near skyscrapers?

[gopiscrap]

4. yup

the plane flies so close you can just about see what folks are having for dinner. It was one of the more amazing landings I have ever experienced.

[panader0]

16. I landed there in '65 when I was 15

[gopiscrap]

17. I was 23 and myt wife and I had been married 46 days

of which we spent 31 of them at a Benedictine Retreat Center training to be missionaries for the Lutheran Church. We were going there to teach English to Chinese kids

[Blue_Tires]

5. Yeah, the old Kai Tak was infamous for that

they weren't "skyscrapers" as much as they were "highly stacked shanties" back in the day...

Regularly nailing the Kai Tak approach was an unofficial badge of honor among pilots, due to the high degree of skill involved

[gopiscrap]

11. no kidding

[warrant46]

7. For anyone the posters not kidding --Look up Kai Tak Landings on You Tube

Absolutely Stunning

[Blue_Tires]

3. I'm guessing most of the people affected by this

are easily wealthy enough to work out some kind of charter service...

Or, they could join the 21st century and teleconference...

[Egnever]

6. I have never understood the airlines inability to turn a profit

They have been going broke since I was a child in the early 70's

[Art_from_Ark]

8. Well, a lot of those '70s airlines eventually did go belly-up

Eastern, Pan Am, TWA, Northwest Orient...

What was their undoing? Too much competition? Unprofitable routes? Excessive fuel prices and landing fees? Too many accidents?

It's a tough business, that's for sure.

[Egnever]

9. I know

one would think in the last 40 years they would have figured out a way to be profitable.

[Poddy Fries]

10. I recently did the Atlanta to Johannesburg trip on Delta.

Sitting in the middle seat gets old after 16 hours...

[marmar]

12. I could never do the middle seat for that long......

I flew from Detroit to Frankfurt in the middle seat and nearly lost my marbles. I make sure to take care of seat selection immediately now if I'm taking a long flight.

[Poddy Fries]

13. Normally, I would do the same (regarding seat selection) but...

I was traveling with my father who is in his 70's. I wasn't about to put him in the middle.

[pinboy3niner]

14. Welcome to DU

I've done the long flights from L,A. to both Singapore and Taiwan. I think the airlines use more-comfortable seats for those long hauls, but they're still loooong. At least they served gourmet meals and provided hot washcloths, slippers, eyeshades, and other amenities. For a lot of us, that long flight was just to get to our connection--we still had more traveling to do! I enjoyed flying EVA Air because they seemed to do everything they could to make the long flight as easy as possible.

[Poddy Fries]

15. Thanks!

It was cattle car-class on the Delta flight. It wasn't bad service, mind you...just indifferent.

[marmar]

19. That's our Delta !!!

[NYC Liberal]

18. Took a flight from Bangkok to NY on Thai Air in 2005, shortly after they launched it.

That was an 18-hour flight, but the plane had a ton of room and was very comfortable (Airbus A340-500).



They discontinued that route only a year or two later as I recall.

[Savannahmann]

20. The longer the flight, the more fuel.

But it's more complicated than that. To carry a full fuel load, you put the plane at close to max weight with passengers and their luggage. No weight allocation for any air cargo. As a hint of how much fuel you burn carrying fuel remember the Apollo missions. For every pound of weight they added to the spacecraft, they needed four pounds of fuel to get it to the moon. The reason they went with three stages was to shuck the unneeded dead weight as soon as possible.

On shorter flights, the airline can fill the unused cargo area with air freight. Fed ex flights don't carry it all. That helps offset the costs of operating the plane, and allows the airline to reduce ticket prices. That is why the direct flight was almost three grand more.

[JCMach1]

21. Have done Dubai-Houston flights non-stop several times

It rocks in the sense that you get it all over without a stop.