Where do the limits lie for ultra-long-haul air travel?

Plane Talk: ‘Were I to put money on the next 9,000-mile-plus link, it would have Australia at one end. But I would need long odds’

If you have encountered CNN’s Richard Quest on a flight, there’s a good chance that it was setting a new aviation endurance record. In March, the business journalist was aboard the inaugural non-stop flight from Australia to the UK, Qantas flight 9 from Perth to London – a point-to-point distance of 9,009 miles.

And early on Friday morning, at New York’s Newark Airport, he stepped from Singapore Airlines flight 22 at the end of a marathon trip from Southeast Asia, 9,534 miles away, in just under 18 hours.

But Mr Quest may have a wait before he checks in for another record breaker.

After the reported success of London-Perth, there has been speculation about a link from Paris to the Western Australian capital. But it would dilute Qantas’s traffic on the London-Perth route; some of the passengers on the existing nonstop are connecting to other cities such as Dublin, Madrid and Amsterdam.

Paris would offer the same connections, but little that is fresh beyond the option to reach French provincial destinations by train. Also, Charles de Gaulle Airport is a stronghold for the Skyteam alliance, while Qantas is a member of Oneworld. But in any event it won’t count as a record breaker, at a relatively puny 8,872 miles.

Ultra-long-haul must surely now be defined as anything over 9,000 miles: an elite trio of Singapore Airlines (Singapore-New York), Qantas (Perth-London) and the Qatar Airways link from Doha to Auckland.

Qantas has already promised a London-Sydney nonstop (10,561 miles) will begin in 2022. The Australian airline has invited the two leading aircraft makers, Airbus and Boeing, to provide the perfect plane for a flight lasting 20 hours or more.

By “perfect,” Qantas means one that keeps the accountants as well as the passengers happy, allowing it to fly the route in either direction with no payload restrictions. Either the Airbus A350 or an ultra-long-haul derivative of the Boeing 777 should do the trick. But the link between the biggest cities in western Europe and Australia is probably the longest viable route using current aircraft technology.

You can make a commercial case for London-Melbourne, too, but that is 70 miles shorter. London-Auckland, is more technically (at 11,400 miles) and commercially challenging: it has a much smaller potential market, as fewer people live in New Zealand’s entire North Island than in Melbourne.

So which routes could potentially join the 9,000-miles-plus club?

Much depends on the price of oil. On long flights, many tons of fuel are burnt carrying fuel for later in the journey. So even a small hike in the cost of aviation fuel can turn a route into a loss-maker.

Airlines may also face increasing opposition from the “green” lobby. Ultra-long-haul flights have very heavy environmental footprints, with fuel consumption and emissions per passenger far higher than one-stop alternatives.

But if Singapore-New York pays, then other airlines may try for some other extreme Southeast Asia-to-US routes.

Bangkok to Dallas comes in at 9,020 miles, with an honourable mention to Jakarta-Los Angeles at 15 miles short of the line.

From a European perspective, Istanbul-Melbourne (9,083 miles) also has the potential to be a flyaway success. Melbourne has strong ethnic connections with southern and eastern Europe.

The new Istanbul Airport, due to open next month on the European side of the Bosphorus, is an ideal hub for passengers from Rome, Belgrade or Athens to connect.

Turkey’s largest city also has a massive population (15 million or so), giving it an edge in terms of potential market over the traditional Gulf hubs of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha.

Sydney (9,293 miles) would also work well from Istanbul.

As a leading southern hemisphere metropolis, Sydney is an attractive destination for airlines. A link with Chicago (9,232 miles) is likely to arrive long before a route to New York (9,940) – not just because of the shorter distance, but also because NYC is an odd finishing point.

Sure, it is America’s biggest conurbation. But even ultra-long-haul routes need some onward connecting traffic. And from an Australian perspective, there are few final destinations where a New York connection beats the existing Sydney gateways of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Dallas Fort-Worth.

The odd passenger transferring to Halifax in Nova Scotia or Reykjavik in Iceland will not do much to sustain a route of nearly 10,000 miles. But Chicago O’Hare has a dense onward network to destinations throughout the Midwest, the US East Coast and southern Canada.

Sydney-Toronto (9,663 miles) might conceivably work, since it gives easy access beyond Canada’s biggest city to the capital Ottawa, and Montreal, without the need to go through US immigration.

Between Australia and South America? The only significant 9,000-mile-plus city pairs are Sydney to Caracas and Melbourne to Bogota. With the Venezuelan economy imploding, and Colombia not yet on the must-visit lists of many Australians, the world is not ready for these world-beaters.

The Gulf-based airlines like to show off their long-haul credentials, but it’s gone a bit quiet since Emirates announced its Dubai-Panama City route, and then quietly backtracked. So a 9,182-mile link from Dubai to the Chilean capital, Santiago, is not for this era.

Were I to put money on the next 9,000-mile-plus link, it would have Australia at one end: Sydney-Chicago, Istanbul-Melbourne or Sydney-Toronto. But I would need long odds, and none will arrive until 2020 at the earliest.

Plenty of time, then, to try to learn Richard Quest’s secret of how he looks fresh and crisp when emerging from an ultra-long-haul flight, when the rest of us resemble discombobulated derelicts.