People around the world regularly choose commercial airliners as a mode of transportation, with some total 4.6 billion commercial airline passengers expected to fly from any location to another, regardless of far apart they are in terms of global airline traffic in 2019, says one of the most widely-trusted market-wide global commercial airliner studies.
As of Dec. 2017, per the United States Bureau of Transportation Statistics, when it comes to international flights carried out by United States-based carriers such as Southwest Airlines and Delta Airlines, as well as internationally-based commercial airliners’ flights to and from the United States, the average flight lasts 2,400 miles. Considering the average commercial jet travels anywhere between 550 and 575 miles per hour — according to this data, that is – the average international flight lasts between 4 hours, 10 minutes, and 4 hours, 22 minutes.
What about the record for the longest commercial airliner trip ever carried out?
The single longest commercial passenger flight that is regularly scheduled from Newark, New Jersey, via its Newark Liberty International Airport, all the way to Singapore’s Singapore Changi Airport, spans some 9,534 miles and a flight time ranging anywhere between 18 hours, 30 minutes, and 18 hours, 45 minutes. No commercial flights – not a single one – spans 19 hours or greater without stopping for fuel, which includes in-flight refueling, though the practice of in-flight refueling almost never takes places in modern commercial airline flights.
This flight, Singapore Airlines SQ 21, was officially outdone for the first time by Qantas, an international commercial airliner based out of Australia. The largest commercial airliner in all of Australia, Qantas managed to carry 49 people from New York City, New York, to Sydney, Australia, through a 19-hour, 16-minute flight via a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner.
This is a big deal for commercial aviation
The Qantas flight, originating from the Big Apple’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, which broke the 10,000-mile marker for the first time in commercial aviation’s known history, is one of a few boundary-pushing flights that Qantas expects to open up.
By 2023, Qantas claims that it should be regularly offering direct, non-stop commercial airliner flights both to and from Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney, three cities spread across Australia’s eastern coast, to both London, England, and New York City, New York, each of which is of similar required flight time and distance to the one completed just yesterday, on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/qantas-new-york-sydney-flight-record-scli-intl/index.html
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