Long-haul flights a global gateway

THE emergence of ultra-longhaul flights is allowing airlines to offer new destinations to time-poor Australian travellers fed up with waiting in foreign airports for hours on end for a connecting service.

As aircraft technology improves and airlines focus on more efficient flight planning, fuel planning and weight reductions, previously unreachable destinations can now be handled in a single flight.

Qantas has already announced a monster 14,498km flight from Perth to London, which is set to start in March but some of its competitors are also starting to join the ultralong-haul club.

Today United Airlines begins a new daily service from Sydney to Houston in Texas, which is expected to bring an extra 27,000 visitors a year into NSW and generate an additional $47 million in annual visitor expenditure.

The 16-hour flight on the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner will be the longest in operation from Sydney and covers a whopping 13,834km.

The aircraft carries 252 passengers and is scheduled to land at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport at 10.30am, a prime time allowing passengers the ability to connect to more than 70 cities in the US, Canada and Latin America.

The announcement from United comes after Sydney Airport reported a record 43.3 million passengers passed through its three terminals in the past year. International passenger numbers grew by 7.2 per cent to hit 15.9 million, and domestic passengers increased by 1.6 per cent to 27.4 million.

The international growth was underpinned by capacity development on the Middle Eastern, Asian and United States routes, predominantly via the Airbus A380 aircraft.

Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert, who will open the new route to Houston today, said that the airport had added one million new seats of capacity within the past year.