Making Connections

Having recently completed trips to Myanmar and New Zealand, my enthusiasm for intercontinental flights is temporarily at a low ebb. I still like flying, which is just as well considering how much I do of it, but the 16 hours from New York to Hong Kong, coupled with the day-for-night 12-hour time difference, left me shattered for at least three days. Actually, it’s not the really long flights that are unbearable. It’s waiting around for a connection, and then the second airplane, which do the damage. I was fine in Hong Kong, but by the time I reached Yangon, at 1 a.m. local time, I was beginning seriously to question whether my long-haul traveling life was quite as glamorous as people invariably tell me it is.

Before the Great Recession, the trend was for flights to get longer and longer. Singapore Airlines used to fly the 19-hour, 9,522-mile route to New York nonstop. Soon, I was told, you will be able to travel from any major city to any other major city on a single flight. Then the world economy went into free-fall, the number of First and Business Class passengers declined drastically and the price of aviation fuel went through the roof. Ultra-long-haul became uneconomic, and we went back to changing planes. Now, however, the sands have shifted once again. Aviation fuel is cheap and new types of aircraft have more efficient engines and lighter composite structures. The Boeing 777-200LR and the Airbus A350-900ULR — the latter will have a range of 10,350 miles — will shortly fly us back to the status quo ante. At the time of writing, the world’s longest flight is operated by Emirates from Dubai to Panama City (17 hours 35 minutes), but Singapore Airlines has already announced that the nonstop New York flight will be reinstated. Ultra-long-haul is back. And if that means I spend less time waiting around for connecting flights while succumbing to a stupor of jet lag, then, frankly, I’m thrilled.