What does it take to keep the world's longest commercial flight in the air for nearly an entire day? From meticulous flight planning and fuel calculations to crew scheduling, passenger comfort, and navigating international airspace, the logistics behind these ultra-long-haul journeys are nothing short of extraordinary.
In this video, we explore the complex operations that make the world's longest flight possible and reveal the incredible coordination required before the aircraft even leaves the ground.
If you enjoy aviation, engineering, and behind-the-scenes insights into global travel, don't forget to **Like**, **Subscribe**, and turn on notifications for more fascinating videos.
💬 **Conversation Opener:** What's the longest flight you've ever taken?
#Aviation #LongestFlight #Airlines #Aircraft #Logistics #Engineering #Travel #AviationFacts #FlightOperations #AirTravel
In this video, we explore the complex operations that make the world's longest flight possible and reveal the incredible coordination required before the aircraft even leaves the ground.
If you enjoy aviation, engineering, and behind-the-scenes insights into global travel, don't forget to **Like**, **Subscribe**, and turn on notifications for more fascinating videos.
💬 **Conversation Opener:** What's the longest flight you've ever taken?
#Aviation #LongestFlight #Airlines #Aircraft #Logistics #Engineering #Travel #AviationFacts #FlightOperations #AirTravel
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NewsTranscript
00:00Something incredible in the world of aviation and geography is happening next year in 2027.
00:05Throughout all of our lives, we generally believe that the world is about as well-connected through
00:09air travel as it could already possibly be, and that everywhere is just a short flight away from
00:13anywhere else. And yet, one of the world's largest airline markets has never been directly connected
00:19to two of the world's other largest markets. To date, there has still never been a regularly
00:24scheduled non-stop commercial airline flight between the heavily populated east coast of
00:28Australia and Europe or the U.S. East Coast, which means that residents of major Australian cities
00:34like Sydney and Melbourne, both home to more than 5 million people, have never been able to take a
00:39direct flight to places like New York City or London. The major reason why is simply due to sheer
00:44geographic distance. If you took Australia and placed it on the exact opposite side of the world,
00:50you'd see that it'd be placed in the North Atlantic, right in between Europe and North America. Thus,
00:56Europe and the U.S. East Coast are about as geographically far away from the Australian
01:00East Coast as you can possibly get, since they're basically on the opposite ends of the planet from
01:05each other. And to date, our technology has not been good enough to enable a commercial airliner
01:10fully loaded with passengers and cargo to make that entire long journey that far non-stop.
01:16Establishing a non-stop direct commercial flight between Sydney and London, two massive, culturally
01:22similar English-speaking cities on nearly opposite ends of the earth, has long been considered to be
01:27one of the holy grails of the aviation community for nearly a century now, and one of the final
01:32unbroken frontiers left on the earth for global aviation to surpass. As long ago as 1989, commercial
01:40airliners like the Boeing 747 have technically managed to make the entire journey between them non-stop,
01:45but they were always test flights filled with special fuel and were always virtually empty
01:49without any passengers or cargo to save on weight to extend their range. The trick was always to
01:55find an aircraft that could actually make the entire journey with a full payload of passengers
01:59and cargo on board, which until today has remained elusive and just out of reach technologically.
02:06But not for much longer, because next year in 2027, Qantas Airlines is finally expected to
02:12introduce direct non-stop service between the two cities for the first time in history.
02:18It will be the culmination of the past decade of relentless technological advancement and
02:23engineering by multiple companies, at the end of nearly a century of air travel between the two
02:28cities that has always involved at least one stopover point along the way. It is poised to completely
02:35revolutionize travel between the largest cities of the UK and Australia, and upon its opening,
02:40it will immediately become the longest non-stop flight in the world, lasting for roughly 22
02:46straight hours. That long of a flight might sound like a nightmare to you, but when you consider that
02:52it'll enable a human being to travel from one side of the world to the other in less than a
02:56day,
02:57and when you consider how brutal the journey between the UK and Australia has been historically,
03:02that 22-hour journey that'll start next year will seem like nothing other than a technological miracle.
03:09In the long era before the advent of air travel, the journey between the UK and Australia was a slow
03:15and grinding one. In the late 18th century, when Britain began colonizing and settling Australia,
03:21sailing between them took between 8 and 12 months each way. By the time of the 1850s and 1870s,
03:28with the advent of fast clipper ships, the journey time was dramatically reduced down to between 70
03:33and 120 days. And with the later advent of steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal
03:38between the 1870s and the First World War, the journey time was cut down even further to between
03:4330 and 50 days. It wasn't until after the end of the First World War that travel between the UK
03:49and Australia could actually be accomplished in less than a month, and it came with the first ever
03:54flight between them in 1919. Known at the time as the Great Air Race, six contestants took part and
04:01the victors were a pair of Australian brothers, Ross and Keith Smith, who were accompanied by two
04:06mechanics. Together, the four men flew a modified Vickers-Vinnie bomber that had been developed during
04:11the First World War across an odyssey of the Eurasian continent towards Australia that covered roughly 14,350
04:19kilometers. Starting in London, the team planned for at least 14 stops along the way to Australia for
04:26rest, refueling, and maintenance. After departing London, the plan called for stops in Lyon, Rome,
04:32Cairo, Damascus, Basra, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Akyab or modern-day Sitwe in Myanmar, Rangoon or
04:39modern-day Yangon, Singora or modern-day Songkla in Thailand, Singapore, Batavia or modern-day Jakarta,
04:47and Surubaya before the final arrival at Darwin in northern Australia. However, along the way,
04:53the team had to make nine additional unscheduled stops due to unanticipated weather, fuel, maintenance,
04:59and operational needs that cropped up, which brought the total number of stops they had to make along
05:03the way to an insane 23. All in all, it still took this team in 1919 a whopping 27 days
05:11in 20 hours to
05:13fly between London and Darwin, with a total amount of flying time in the air of 136 hours along the
05:19way. But in doing so, the barrier had been broken. They proved that flights between Britain and Australia
05:25were possible, and that for the first time in history, travel between the two land masses on
05:30opposite sides of the planet was able to be accomplished in less than a month's time. And it would only
05:36keep on
05:37improving from there, and the dream of eventually establishing a continuous non-stop flight between
05:42the two continents was born. 16 years later, in 1935, Australian-based Qantas Airlines and UK-based
05:49Imperial Airways, one of the predecessors to British Airways, jointly opened the first-ever
05:54commercial air route between the UK and Australia running between London and Brisbane. But it was still
06:00a brutal ordeal when compared with air travel between them today. Flights only departed once per week,
06:06and the total travel time took 12 and a half days to complete. When departing from London,
06:12the flight would have to stop in Paris, where passengers would take an overnight train to bring
06:15DC, where they would then resume the flight portion with further stops in Athens, an overnight stop in
06:21Alexandria, another stop in Gaza, an overnight stop in Baghdad, further stops in Basra, Kuwait City,
06:27Bahrain, and another overnight stop in Sharjah, more stops in Wadar and Karachi, with another overnight stop in
06:33Jodhpur, even more stops in Delhi, Kanpur, Allahabad, and another overnight stop in Calcutta,
06:39followed by yet more stops in Akihab, Rangoon, and another overnight stop in Bangkok, followed by a stop
06:45in Alor Star, and another overnight stop in Singapore, with more stops in Jakarta, Surubaya, and an overnight
06:52stop in Rambang, followed by a stop in Koh Peng, and another overnight stop in Darwin, with one final overnight
07:00stop in Longreach, before finally arriving into Brisbane 12 and a half days later, after having
07:07left from London, with no less than 28 scheduled stops along the way. Multiple different aircraft
07:14were used for the different sections of the route, and only around 10 passengers could be carried along
07:18it as the flights departed once per week. And for the privilege of getting between the UK and Australia
07:23in just 12 and a half days in 1935, the price for a ticket on board cost £195, which in
07:31modern 2026
07:32value is more than US$50,000. Nonetheless, the leap from the 1919 race to the 1935 scheduled service
07:41between the UK and Australia was a remarkable achievement. The trip time was cut down by more
07:46than half in just 16 years, and it went from a daring expedition only undertaken by pioneering
07:52aviators to something that a wealthy passenger could reasonably actually buy a ticket for. And as the
07:59technology advanced further, both the price and time would continue climbing down more and more as well.
08:05By 1938, Imperial Airways opened up the first ever London to Sydney service that primarily relied upon new
08:11Short Empire flying boats, which were novel because they didn't need paved runways or infrastructure to
08:17land at. They just needed rivers or harbors, which in the 1930s were much more abundant across Eurasia
08:23than paved runways were. The International Terminal in Sydney back then wasn't even really an airport
08:28at all in the modern sense, but a flying boat base in Rose Bay on Sydney Harbour where passengers boarded
08:34from docks and slipways as if it were a maritime voyage instead. The Short Empire flying boats were able to
08:40cut
08:40the number of stops between the UK and Australia in half, down from 28 to only 14, while they also
08:47cut the total travel time down from 12 and a half days to 9 and a half days instead. As
08:53you'd expect,
08:53the Second World War significantly disrupted the travel market between Australia and the UK for all
08:58kinds of reasons. But by the summer of 1943, Qantas managed to figure out an insane workaround that is
09:05important for the lore behind Qantas's modern route today. In order to re-establish the lost area,
09:10connection to the UK, Qantas cobbled together five consolidated PBY Catalina aircraft that they
09:16were able to use to make the first non-stop commercial flights across the entire Indian Ocean.
09:22Beginning in Perth, Western Australia, the Catalinas were flown to their maximum intensity for more than
09:283,500 nautical miles clear across the Indian Ocean to an RAEF base at Kogala on the southern shore of
09:35Sri Lanka, which at the time represented the longest non-stop commercial air route ever devised.
09:41Navigated entirely without the aid of radio, the crews on board were forced to rely entirely on just
09:47basic navigation tools like a compass and the stars. With departure strategically timed so that the flight
09:53would cross through Japanese-occupied territory under the cover of darkness, and with the flight times
09:58lasting between 27 and 33 hours, the crew and passengers on board would witness two sunrises
10:04along the way. And it remains the longest airtime for a commercial flight in aviation history still
10:10to this day. Once they arrived in Sri Lanka, passengers would be transported by ground to Karachi, where they
10:16would continue on along their way to London. This service became known as the Double Sunrise Service,
10:22and in a nod to their own history of pushing aviation's boundaries, it is what Qantas has named their
10:27current direct Sydney to London service after, Project Sunrise. By 1944, Qantas began calling the
10:35revived route between Sydney and London the Kangaroo Route for the first time. Named after all of the stops,
10:41or hops, that their aircraft had to take along the way between them that were reminiscent of a Kangaroo's hops.
10:46After the war ended, the flights clear across the Indian Ocean were ended, and by 1947, Qantas took
10:53over the complete operation of the entire route between Australia and the UK for the first time.
10:58Utilizing new Lockheed Constellation aircraft, Qantas's restored and fully operated post-war service
11:04between Sydney and London could carry 29 passengers between the two cities in as little as four days.
11:10Less than half the time it took to do so pre-war, while the ticket prices had also come down
11:15to the equivalent of just 26,000 US dollars in today's money, also about half of the price that
11:21it was pre-war. And by this point, the Constellation aircraft flying the Kangaroo Route only required
11:27six stops along the way in Darwin, Singapore, Calcutta, Karachi, Cairo, and Tripoli,
11:32with Singapore and Cairo serving as the only remaining overnight stops.
11:37Over the next decade going into the 1950s, several competitors to Qantas opened up their own Sydney to
11:43London routes as well. Qantas was flying four flights a week. BOAC, one of the other predecessors
11:49of British Airways, was also flying four a week, while Air India and KLM were each flying one a week.
11:54By the end of the Super Constellation piston-driven era in early 1959, Qantas had managed to get the
11:59total travel time along the route between Sydney and London down to just about two days in 16 hours,
12:05utilizing about the same number of stops as they had been in the immediate post-war era.
12:09It was also about the absolute limit that piston-driven aircraft could reasonably reach.
12:15But 1959 was an important year for the Kangaroo Route, because it's also the year that Qantas first
12:21adopted jet aircraft for the route. Qantas was the first customer outside of the United States to
12:27receive the Boeing 707 jetliner, and they immediately put them on the Kangaroo Route. And virtually overnight,
12:34as the 707 jets replaced the piston-driven Constellations,
12:37the total travel time between Sydney and London was slashed by roughly 40%, or by about 25 hours,
12:44through just a single technological leap. The introduction of the 707 enabled air travel
12:49between the two cities to be accomplished in as little as 38 hours, but it still involved roughly
12:54the same number of intermediate stops along the way as during the previous piston-driven era.
12:59The primary innovation of the 707 for the Kangaroo Route wasn't the reduction in stops,
13:04but the sheer faster speed that it could actually fly along them at.
13:09Five or six stops along the way between the cities was still required, but for the first time,
13:14the entire journey could be accomplished in only about a day and a half.
13:18In order to get rid of the number of stops and save even more time along the journey,
13:22jetliner technology would need to advance further, and range would need to be improved.
13:26And both would eventually come with Boeing's release of the 747 in the early 1970s.
13:32In 1971, Qantas introduced the 747 to the Kangaroo Route in another technological leap forward.
13:39When compared to the 707, the 747 could carry more than double the number of passengers and add a
13:44maximum range of about 7,260 nautical miles, compared to the 5,000 nautical miles of the 707.
13:52As a result, the 747 could carry many times more passengers along the Kangaroo Route and
13:57required significantly fewer stops along the way.
14:00So, upon their introduction in 1971, Qantas's 747s could fly between Sydney and London with only
14:06two stops along the way in Singapore and Bahrain, down from the six stops that were still required
14:11with the older 707 jets. And as a result, the travel time between Sydney and London fell further by
14:17several hours, while the price steadily came down for passengers as well. For Australia,
14:23the 747 was the aircraft that finally transformed Europe from an exclusive elite destination into a
14:30realistic holiday option for the middle class. And as further improvements to the 747's range were
14:36made by Boeing with later additions, Qantas continued improving the Australia-Europe connection
14:40even more as well. In 1974, Qantas was able to use the 747-200 model to introduce the first
14:47ever one-stop service between the Australian and European continents. But it wasn't between Sydney
14:53and London. It was between Perth and London with a stopover in Bombay instead. Because geographically,
15:00Perth is about one-sixth closer to the UK than Sydney is. The route between Sydney and London using 747s
15:07still involved double stopovers in Singapore and Bahrain all the way until 1988, when the new Boeing 747-300
15:14finally enabled Qantas to introduce the first ever one-stop service between the two cities,
15:20eliminating the stopover at Bahrain and retaining Singapore as the only stopover along the Kingaroo
15:25route still remaining. With this innovation, Qantas managed to get the total travel time between Sydney
15:31and London down to only around 25 per 26 hours, or just a little over a full day. And this
15:39is generally
15:40where the technology has remained at ever since. In 1989, Qantas did manage to set a headline-grabbing
15:46record with a Boeing 747-400 that they were able to fly non-stop directly between London and Sydney in
15:54just a little over 20 hours. The first time that anyone had managed to fly a commercial airliner between
15:59them directly without ever stopping. However, that flight utilized special fuel and it didn't contain
16:05any passengers or cargo on board to save on weight and to extend range. Fully loaded, the 747 still
16:12couldn't ever make the journey non-stop, and as it would turn out, Qantas' 1989 test flight would be the
16:18first and last direct flight made between London and Sydney for the next three decades. For the most part,
16:25for more than two decades since 2004, the longest non-stop commercial flight in the world has been
16:31offered by Singapore Airlines between Singapore and the New York City area. At first between Singapore
16:37Changi Airport and Newark, and since 2020 between Singapore Changi and New York JFK. The route covers a
16:43distance of 15,344 kilometers and takes roughly 18 and a half hours to complete. The distance between
16:51Sydney and London is much greater than this at just over 17,000 kilometers. And for the entirety of the
16:5821st century so far, no direct route between them has yet come into existence. Traditionally, in modern
17:05times, there have been four primary flight routes to take between them. Qantas, along with rivals like
17:10Singapore Airlines and British Airways, have offered the fastest and most direct route with a one-stop flight
17:16between them in Singapore. Generally, upon arrival in Singapore, passengers on the flight will deboard
17:21while the plane is serviced, cleaned, and refueled before they reboard and take back off again. They
17:27generally spend around two hours down on the ground in Singapore in addition to the time it takes to land
17:32and take back off again. While the entire journey gate to gate between Sydney and London generally takes
17:38a bit more than 25 hours on average to complete. Other routes operated by Persian Gulf Airlines like Emirates,
17:44Etihad, and Qatar Airways offer similar one-stop service routing through Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Doha.
17:50But these are slightly longer than the route through Singapore and are also prone to wartime
17:55disruptions due to broader Middle Eastern instability issues. There are much longer but sometimes cheaper
18:00routes through Asian connection points like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Delhi, or Bangkok, and since 2018,
18:07there's been Qantas's non-stop service between Perth and London to consider as well.
18:11Because Perth is about one-sixth closer to London than Sydney, in the 1970s Qantas was able to introduce
18:18one-stop service between Perth and London more than a decade before it was able to offer the same
18:23service between Sydney and London. And in the 2010s and 20s Qantas has similarly been able to offer
18:29non-stop service between Perth and London first as well. Lasting for around 18 hours, the non-stop
18:36Perth to London flight is currently the third longest lasting non-stop flight in the world, while it
18:41also offered travelers from Sydney the ability to have another one-stop flight option to London with
18:46a stopover point in Perth along the way. It was also notably the first ever direct non-stop commercial
18:53flight established between the European and Australian continents, which itself was already a huge
18:59accomplishment. But there was still no direct non-stop flight between Sydney and London. And in 2017,
19:06just before the non-stop Perth to London service was started, Qantas decided to begin setting the pieces
19:11an emotion to finally change that. In August of 2017, Qantas unveiled Project Sunrise, their ambition to
19:20finally achieve a non-stop direct commercial flight between Sydney and London. The Sunrise part of the
19:27name was both a nod to Qantas's history of pushing the boundaries of long-haul air travel with the double
19:32sunrise flights of the 1940s between Perth and Sri Lanka, and to the fact that passengers flying directly
19:38between Sydney and London would also experience two sunrises while on board. Qantas challenged both
19:44Boeing and Airbus to engineer an aircraft that could actually handle flying the route with a full payload
19:50of cargo and passengers on board, and both companies quickly got to work with their designs. Two years later
19:57in 2019, both companies submitted their designs to Qantas, but then in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic placed a
20:04sharp halt on the planning for the project. For the next two years, Project Sunrise was
20:09effectively frozen and put on hold until the summer of 2022, when Qantas ultimately decided to go with
20:15the Airbus proposal for a modified version of the Airbus A350 that they called the A350-1000ULR for
20:23ultra-long range. When compared with a conventional A350-1000, the A350-1000ULR is designed to have an
20:31extended range of 1,000 extra nautical miles. This was accomplished by adding an additional fuel tank
20:37on board that can carry an extra 20,000 liters of fuel, added structural reinforcements to the airframe
20:44that can support the added takeoff weight, and by reducing the number of passengers on board from
20:48more than 300 to only 238 to save on payload weight. With these modifications in place, the A350-1000ULR will
20:57be capable of flying more than 17,000 kilometers non-stop for at least 22 hours. Or in other words,
21:05just long enough to be able to fly non-stop between Sydney and London. Qantas placed an order for 12
21:10of
21:11these A350-1000ULRs from Airbus to service the London to Sydney route, with the expectation that
21:16service would begin in late 2025. Unfortunately, during the aircraft certification process in 2024,
21:22regulatory concerns arose around the design of the aircraft's extra fuel tank, and Airbus was compelled
21:28to completely redesign it, which delayed the project again. The first deliveries of the new
21:33aircraft were then expected to be made at Qantas in late 2026, but then in early 2026, Qantas announced
21:40that due to unexpected supply chain disruptions that were affecting Airbus's production, the first
21:45aircraft delivery wouldn't actually be made until early 2027. So currently, the A350-1000ULR certification
21:52and testing flights are taking place in Europe. While Qantas and Airbus anticipate that the first
21:57deliveries of the aircraft will be made during the first half of 2027, with Project Sunrise's
22:03non-stop service between Sydney and London set to finally commence in the second half of 2027,
22:08a full decade after Qantas first announced the start of the project in 2017. And once it's in service,
22:16after finally eliminating the final stop along the Kangaroo route in Singapore that's been around since the
22:211980s, it'll reduce the total travel time between London and Sydney to just 22 hours, shedding between
22:28three and four hours from the fastest journey that's available today. And for the first time in history,
22:33offering commercial air travel between the two cities on nearly opposite ends of the earth in less
22:38than a single day. And it'll also blow the Singapore to New York flight out of the water for the
22:44longest
22:44non-stop flight in the world, beating that route's record that has been held for more than two decades
22:50since 2004. Now, sitting on a flight for 22 straight hours might sound like a nightmare to a lot of
22:57people
22:58still, but it's much better than the travel options of the past were, while Qantas is also doing everything
23:04that it can to make the flight as unpainful as possible. The 238 seats on board will be divided into
23:11six very spacious first-class suites up front that resemble a studio apartment, followed by 52
23:17business-class suites that'll feature closable doors for privacy, 40 premium economy seats,
23:23and then 140 economy seats that'll offer a generous 33-inch seat pitch, more than most economy seats
23:31anywhere else do. Qantas is also adding what it calls a well-being zone on board the flights as well,
23:37which will give passengers a dedicated space to stand, stretch, exercise, and move around while
23:43on board for 22 continuous hours. In addition to the route to London, Qantas is also planning on using
23:49the A350-1000ULR to launch a direct non-stop route between Sydney and New York City for the first time
23:55as well, which will be great for travelers between these cities who've traditionally had to lay over
24:00somewhere in between like Dallas or Los Angeles first. But coming in at about a thousand kilometers
24:06closer to Sydney than London is, the New York City flights will be a bit shorter and faster.
24:11In the future, Qantas might use the extended range of the A350-1000ULR to open up more direct routes to
24:18London and New York from other major Australian cities like Melbourne and Brisbane. But either way,
24:24once Project Sunrise begins with their non-stop flights between Sydney and London in 2027,
24:29one of the holy grails of commercial aviation will have finally been reached. Since the very first
24:36flight was made between London and Sydney all the way back in 1919 that took nearly 28 entire days to
24:43accomplish, it's only taken a little more than a century of continuous innovation and progress to get
24:49that total travel time down to less than one day. And I think that that is nothing less than one
24:56of the
24:56most incredible achievements of the modern era. And it's something I believe that all of humanity
25:02should collectively take pride in. Meanwhile, in the United States, one of the most concerning things
25:08about living here, besides not yet having direct New York City to Sydney flights, is that there were
25:13pretty weak data privacy laws and a ton of personal data that gets put out into the public record,
25:19frequently by local, state, and federal governments themselves. It's always been like that here and
25:24it wasn't really ever a huge problem before the advent of the internet. But these days, it means that
25:29people are able to turn a profit off of making it easier for other people to get your personal
25:33information, and they do. They're called people sites, and if you want to see for yourself, just search
25:39your name and address or phone number and you'll probably come across a bunch of these sites that list at
25:44some of your personal information. But you also have the power to change this. You have the legal
25:50right to request that your personal data is removed from each and every one of these sites. The biggest
25:56problem is that it takes forever to actually do that. They make it as hard as possible, and you have
26:01to do it individually over and over again for every single one of the endless sites that have it. But
26:08that's
26:08the problem that this video's sponsor, Incogni, fixes. They'll do this entire process for you on
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27:06and the journalism that I'm trying to do here as well. And as always, thank you so much for watching.