WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO TAKE A 19HR 16MIN FLIGHT!
19 hours 16 minutes, 10,000 miles, 15 time zones, 101 tonnes of fuel — and a Macarena at 40,000 feet. But what’s it really like to be a passenger on board the world’s longest flight?
You could watch 52 episodes of Friends in 19 hours and 16 minutes, or listen to the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle — or fly non-stop from New York to Sydney on the world’s longest commercial flight.
You could also, in the time it took a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner to make the trip, dance the Macarena several hundred times — but we only did it once, in the empty economy cabin as we flew over California.
I am on a trial flight for what aims to become the longest-ever commercial service, which will begin in 2023 if regulators co-operate with the Australian airline Qantas.
The previous record was held by Singapore Airlines’ service from Newark, New Jersey, to Singapore, which comes in at a brisk 18-and-a-half hours. In recent years we have entered a new era of ultralong-haul flying: Qatar Airways offers a 17-and-a-half-hour flight from Auckland to Doha, and Qantas’s Perth-to-London flight is only slightly shorter.
My cabin mates on this flight included trial passengers, crew, researchers, cameramen, TV presenters, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce and a flock of seriouslooking aviation reporters. There were just 49 of us in total, cocooned in business class, though some people had to occasionally troop to the back to prevent the plane tilting forward.
Though the flight was genuinely recordbreaking, there was also an element of theatre to the proceedings.
I watched as a popular Australian breakfast-show host danced down the aisle in Qantas pyjamas (‘I’m the poor man’s Piers Morgan,’ he told me when he introduced himself earlier).
But the Macarena was also for science — together with researchers from the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, Qantas was running tests on pilots, crew and a group of six human guinea pigs chosen from the airline’s frequent flyers.
The research question was this: if passengers are forced to convert to Sydney time as soon as they get on board, and prompted to do exercises throughout the flight, would it be possible to mitigate some of the adverse health effects of longhaul flying?
‘There are two things,’ said Marie Carroll, a professor at the University of Sydney who oversaw the onboard experiments. ‘There’s jet lag, which is when the body’s clock is not in synch with the natural dayand-night 24-hour cycle on Earth. There’s also fatigue.’ The latter is related to dehydration and not moving.
How long is it healthy for a person to be on a flight, I ask. ‘We really don’t know,’ Carroll replied, adding that continual flying is ‘ultimately bad for your cardiovascular and immune health’.
Sitting for long periods of time can
increase the risk of deep vein thrombosis, or blood clots that form in your legs. The guinea pigs, who had been logging sleep, food and mood before the flight, also did reaction tests on iPads throughout their time in the air.
The Australians on board were used to long-haul flights and seemed largely unfazed by this one (‘It’s a flight,’ shrugged Laurie Kozlovic, one of the test subjects, when I asked if he had any reservations about the trip).
The Americans, in contrast, acted as if we were on an expedition to the Arctic. ‘How are you holding up?’ we would ask each other, as if we weren’t just getting to lie in bed for a day and have people bring us food.
The pilots who broke the longest flight record in 1927 (51 hours flying in circles over Long Island in a tiny plane) accidentally brought soapy water on board and so had nothing to drink for two days. Charles Lindbergh survived his 33-and-a-half-hour flight across the Atlantic on a single ham and chicken sandwich.
THIs flight, in contrast, featured a menu designed to wake you up at the beginning (a papaya salad and pasta with optional chillies, plus chocolate and coffee), then to put you to sleep in the middle (butternut squash soup, wine, panna cotta).
The lighting was meant to imitate sydney’s, so it was bright for the first half of the flight and dark when it was night in sydney.
staying awake was a struggle: when the lights finally went down I was delirious, having read most of two books, drunk two glasses of white wine and made significant headway with Abba Gold: Greatest Hits, which is apparently one of the only albums I own on my phone.
When I woke up, the Qantas photographer told me I had slept so deeply that three cameramen had been clustered around my seat, filming me for their broadcasts.
‘We wondered if it was creepy but decided it wasn’t,’ he assured me. Later, I would glimpse my huddled, unconscious form on the Australian breakfast show sunrise.
There is one obvious flaw in this experiment: 19-plus hours on a packed plane, in economy, will be very different from sleeping on flat business-class beds and dancing to one-hit wonders from the 1990s with the CEO of Qantas.
‘I think in business, direct flights will be fantastic. But I’m more worried about the people down the back,’ said Carl Petch, one of the test subjects. ‘That’s going to be the interesting one.’
At the moment, a return businessclass flight from New York to sydney with Qantas starts at $6,780 (£5,233). Return flights in economy start at $1,074 (£829).
Flights like this one are likely to take the largest toll on the crew. Flight attendants each had about five hours and 45 minutes off duty, in total. Despite the special sleeping bunks on this flight, none of the attendants I spoke to managed to sleep for more than two hours.
Current regulations limit flying time to 18-and-a-half hours to protect against pilot fatigue. These were waived for the test flight, but pilots’ unions warn of the dangers of fatigue on longer flights, even with rotations and breaks.
‘Pilots are concerned about being able to get enough quality rest during ultra-long-range flights to maintain peak performance, and we believe significant caution should be exercised in the initial operations to make sure there are no unintended consequences,’ said Mark sedgwick, head of the Australian and International Pilots Association, in a media release.
If Qantas wants to offer these flights, it will have to demonstrate that pilots can function for that long. Our four pilots wore brainactivity monitors and had to give urine samples every few hours to test for the hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep cycles. Cameras were mounted in the cockpit to monitor their levels of alertness.
Qantas has been working up to this point for decades. In 1947, when the airline first flew the ‘Kangaroo Route’ from sydney to London, it took seven stops, four days and £585 per passenger (the equivalent of more than £20,000 today).
In 1989, they made the journey in reverse, with no stops but almost no passengers and the seats taken out. They almost ran out of fuel.
Over the next few months, Qantas will test the London-to-sydney route again. On one flight, they will implement the same changes to lighting, meals and passenger movement as on ours. The other will be a control flight with no special changes.
‘We know that getting to the east coast of the United states from the east coast of Australia, and to the UK, is going to be a huge business opportunity,’ said Joyce at a press conference before the flight. ‘That’s why we are keen on doing it. And that’s why these flights have to be ground-breaking.’ Fuel is one of the biggest obstacles to non-stop long-haul flights: immensely heavy, it takes a significant amount of the plane’s reserves just to carry it. stopping to refuel in Los Angeles solves this problem but adds an extra three or four hours to the journey.
Our plane held about 101 tons of fuel at the outset. We landed in sydney with 70 minutes of fuel left in the tank, but only because of the reduced passenger load. With a full load of cargo and passengers, we wouldn’t have made it.
Lead pilot, sean Golding, said that despite having to carry all our fuel, this flight would use less fuel overall than one with a stop. ‘The reason is because as we come into land, we taxi in, we taxi out, we take off again, we climb up. That’s using more fuel.’
To accommodate a full load of passengers, Qantas has solicited proposals from both Boeing and Airbus for aeroplanes with better fuel efficiency and an extended flying range.
The results of the health study won’t be available for some time.
BUT a few days after the flight, I emailed Daniel Brescia, another test subject, to ask if the exercises had worked for him. ‘I’m feeling much less jet-lagged than I would usually be, so I think the experiment was a success in that regard,’ he responded.
He said the results of his alertness tests were roughly the same as before the trip. ‘But the trick was obviously keeping us awake for the first half of the flight, and I’m still not sure how that translates to a plane full of people.’
Even in business class, even with the dancing and the food and the special lighting, flying for nearly 20 hours is disorientating.
When I got off the plane in sydney, the border agent told me I had filled out my entry forms incorrectly. I hadn’t put the date, he said, handing me a pen.
I froze. I couldn’t remember the day, the month or even, for a terrible moment, the year. ‘I was on the test flight,’ I managed.
He understood. ‘It’s the 20th,’ he said. There was a pause. ‘Of October,’ he said. There was another, worse pause. ‘2019,’ he said. Right.
This article first appeared in The Financial Times/ FT.com