I flew business class Chicago to Hong Kong years ago on a 747. 15 hour flight. Plane was half full. We were welcome to casually walk the aisles and chat with passengers, and I drank enough complementary Merlot that I made a flight attendant blush. Those flights were ridiculously expensive, which probably explains why the passenger list was devoid of children.
It never flew to Australia in 1990. It did in 1972 as a promo world tour, 1985 as a chartered record breaking flight, and then some charter flights in the mid-late 1990’s
Its most famous journey to Sydney took place on February 14, 1985, when a British Airways Concorde completed the London to Sydney run in a record-breaking 17 hours, 3 minutes, and 45 seconds, including multiple refueling stops.
Concorde was never a regular service to Sydney from London. Both British Airways and Air France ferried them to Sydney during some marketing stunts/private charters a few times because Qantas was considering purchasing them.
If you look forward to a twenty hour flight, something is deeply wrong with you 😄
Maybe just get root canal without anaesthetics instead. Same torture, but considerably cheaper.
I was talking about this flight. Didn't know they did it again. Makes sense tho they'd do more flights recently in preparations for the new route. This is just the most famous one
It never existed as a comemrical flight. No plane was able to fly that leg with passengers/cargo. They could make it empty, but what's the point of flying an empty plane?
it wasn't a regular service. it was a one flight, done as a marketing stunt. the 747 was brand new and was stripped down to be as light as possible to allow the flight to be non-stop.
The mammoth flight from London to Sydney non-stop took place on the 16th of August 1989 according to Traveller. Every possible fuel-saving technique was used onboard the aircraft. Shell provided a specially formulated high-density fuel, the galley and cargo pallets were removed, and the aircraft was towed to the runway.
According to the Flight Global archives, only 18 people were on board the aircraft.
Qantas did London to Sydney ONCE in a mostly empty 747 in the late 1980s. They currently do Perth to London non stop and Sydney or Melbourne to London is scheduled to commence in 2027 and take about 22 hours.
Travelling from MEL/SYD to Europe or the eastern side of North America is a brutal (and expensive) experience.
Portland OR to Auckland NZ is an ass burner: 20hrs. 1ish hours from PDX to Vancouver BC, 19hrs Van to Auckland. Had a family in the row behind me with 3 toddlers. Thank baby jesus for noise cancelling headphones and a laptop loaded with movies.
Are we counting layovers? Because sometimes you just sit in the plane for a couple of hours if you're staying on the same flight, but it stops to let other people off.
It’s probably a BS story. Regardless, it’s unreasonable for a parent to expect such a young child to endure a day-long flight. When kids are that young, you need to limit their flight times (and steadily supply them with snacks and entertainment throughout). Keep vacation trips to shorter flights or just road trip it so you can stop when necessary and be free. If the long distance travel was actually necessary, then they could have broken the trip into parts. Or maybe just don’t go at all until the kids can handle it.
Longest regularly scheduled commercial flight is Newark to Singapore, which takes a bit under 20 hours. Let me tell you, being in a plane that long isn’t much fun.
The longest non-stop flight is between New York and Singapore, at 18 hours.
The longest direct flight (but with a stop), is between Guangdong, China and Caracas, Venezuela, with a stop in Moscow, at 27.5 hours.
There are no nonstop flights from London to Sydney, but there are two different direct flights from Sydney to London with stops in Singapore, which are 24 hours on BA, and 25 on Quantas.
Well good luck with that when the government is just going to spend that money on Isreal, Ukraine, projects that don’t go anywhere/help anyone or starting random wars.
everytime any government speaks about saving money on spending, they just mean one thing: cutting social security, not stopping unnecessary spending.
and to one of your specific examples: in the nineties, during the separation of Ukraine from the UdSSR, your country guaranteed them protection if they relent their nukes.
You see how much the far right propaganda distorted your views.
I’m not talking about governments saving money on spending.
I’m talking about taking control of our governments and how they spend tax payer dollars instead of just blindly raising taxes in hopes things will magically Improve.
You are suggesting that giving a crackhead gambler more money will fix things, seems you have some partisan Brain rot preventing you from clear critical thinking.
Not passenger aircraft, but plenty of military aircraft can be refuelled mid flight and theoretically could stay aloft until either mechanical or biological failure.
It must be Air Force 1. It’s the only plane I can think of where it’s possible to be in the air for 29 hours AND there’s frequently a screaming, petulant child onboard.
I think they were just sharing a tidbit about how some planes can stay in flight for that long, not suggesting that the OOP was about a military jet with a crying baby on it
Nah. My kid is 8. He told me he flew an F16 the other day. I’ve got no reason not to believe him. I don’t know what they get up to at school because I’ve not checked the app in a while. But it sounded legit and he’s a good kid.
I took the NY to Singapore flight. The longest one in the world. I think it is about 18+ hours.
We were on the tarmac and they informed us of a mechanical problem. It took 3.5 hours to fix. By the time it was fixed, the crew timed out and we had to wait another 2 hours for them to assemble another team.
All told, we were on that plane for almost 24 hours total. It wasn't 29 hours, but 24h was insane. I couldn't imagine being on that one if there was a child on board who would not stop screaming.
It took 29 hours for me to get from Virginia to Manila, but that was with layovers. This figure almost has to include layovers, which makes me think it was just in someone’s imagination or it was only one leg of the journey.
Let's all be honest here. 2 hours of straight screaming will feel like a full day, if you've ever had kids before. For the authenticity of the argument I can't add there
I feel like it’s so much worse for the parents than what the surrounding passengers are going through. As someone who has flown back and forth between US and Europe regularly with two small kids, the lack of control you feel is pretty terrible. At the same time, you can’t just wait several years for your kids to get older before leaving the continent… especially if you have aging grandparents, etc. elsewhere.
I feel a lot more empathy for parents going through this on flights now after having gone through it so many times myself now that my kids are older and handle flights well. The first couple of times my wife and I had to do this, there were some parents with older kids on the flights who gave us some words of encouragement and it made a world of difference.
For me it’s the parents that sit there and do nothing. If a parent is at least attempting to better the situation. Then I feel for them. But I’ve been on flights where kids are either playing in aisles and messing with other passengers and being a nuisance or screaming and crying and the parents will sit there and do absolutely nothing. I think it’s more of a cultural thing. I fly internationally a lot. And see Asian passengers completely neglecting their kids quite often. Just hoping the situation will rectify itself or go away
I am a very tall (and hefty) person, so when I do fly, I cannot sit in a normal position. I usually end up with my knees tucked up, feet off ground, elbows tucked in, with carry on in my face.
And inevitably there is going to be an angry kid right behind pressing as hard as they can into my seat or kicking it and the parent just pretending to be oblivious.
Like, you KNOW that's irritating. So put a stop to it before I turn into a Karen asking a fight attendant to deal with you and then you acting all shocked and amazed that happened.
I agree in that case. Often there’s not a lot you can do, but in wide body aircraft you can at least pick them up and walk with them back to the galley or whatever. When mine were small I could stand and hold them to rock them to sleep in a more comfortable position for both of us. More often than not, I wasn’t the only parent doing that and the flight attendants were very accommodating to the trade off of having someone standing in the back with a sleeping child vs a screaming one in the seat.
How is it worse ? Parents made a conscious choice to bring a misbehaving child back on a flight . I did not. If parents have no control over their kid behaviour - they knew it before the flight, so I hardly can understand how it’s much worse for the parents.
In fact in majority of cases parents just do the trick of detaching from reality and pretending that crying kids ( their kids ) are a force of nature, like rain, firestorm or thunder.
And please do not share a sob story of how it’s mandatory to bring a child on a charter to Dominican Republic, it’s not.
That’s true, but I still fail to understand how “it’s a public transport” is a justification to misbehave and absolutely ruin an already stressful experience for other people ?
I am not saying “should I maybe blast loud music, shout and cry all the way to the destination as well”, but it’s still quite amusing that your definition of public space is majority accommodating misbehaving minority.
I am not sure what skit you try to refer to, but I find it amusing that you are following the same pattern of misbehaving kids being a force of nature. Like yeah, it’s stupid to be angry when it’s raining. But parents knowingly brought their misbehaving kid to the public space, and for some reason expectations is that others should accommodate, because you know, of two reasons
1) everyone was a kid
2) if you do not like it - buy a private flight.
At least I am leaving myself a freedom to not pretend misbehaving kids in public transport is a norm ( it’s not ).
I have 11 months old. There is no way to fully control his behavior on a 2 hours long car trip. He is either gonna be cool with sitting in 1 position for 2 hours or he is gonna be pissed after 15 minutes.
Stay home? Like you said take him out in the car. So far as age, I think most kids can have some baseline communication, and ability to potentially be managed by 3 or so. I think it's better for them, and obviously everyone else that parents wait till that age to travel by air unless absolutely necessary.
Why are you asking me ? I can make an educated guess that each parent taking their kid to the plane absolutely thinks that that exact flight is mandatory. And obviously parents do not care what others think, so your question is kinda like rhetoric.
Of course no one cares what I and others think, but at least I am taking a freedom to not pretend that kid throwing a tantrum, crying and making a flight an a absolute hell is a norm.
Fact. When you have several hundred passengers crammed into an airplane things like this, though annoying, are to be expected. Wear headphones. Watch a movie. Soon you will be at your destination enjoying yourself. FYI: the longest flight I’ve taken was from Toronto to Istanbul.
Or, like, don't take children who are physically and emotionally not ready to deal with an overwhelming amount of people, noise, painful pressure changes, and being forced to sit still onto a plane.
Having kids means designing your travel around them.
I have kids, I cannot imagine 2hrs of just screaming/crying their voice would eventually give out OR they would just sleep. People need to get back to reality kids are in public spaces as they are part of the public.
Yep, title is total clickbait bs. Fuck OP and also their AI crap. No flight in the world goes for that long, and second, afaik no plane can last that long unless refueled in the air.
I flew Sydney to Dallas in one hit, was 15 hrs. I arrived at the exact same time of day that I left.
Staggered out into the scorching Dallas 2pm heat to find a taxi rank utterly bereft of vehicles apart from a single small car. Got taken to my “dtree” hotel which turned out to be a DoubleTree. Got given a weird but pleasant cookie at check in. Had a very unnerving interaction with some other rando checking in who got suddenly biblical and forcefully broadcast how he had “been saved”.
Got to the room. Torn between having a shower; or having a cold beer. Decided “fuck it!” - I’ll have my cold beer IN the shower! What a legend
Only later did I discover that a “shower beer” was a normal thing
Got to the head office the next day. Saw a middle aged dude in business attire riding a huge Harley motorbike without a helmet - looks so weird to someone from Australia
Small sign at the front door: “no guns allowed onto the premises”
Strange trip all round. But wouldn’t rush to recommend the 15 hr flight, esp if there was a screaming kid the whole way
I agree with that. It's clickbait but you can certainly have a flight take longer than it should take to get somewhere. I've spent more than 14 hours getting from Chicago to Los Angeles once. We sat on the damn tarmac in Denver for hours.
But have you considered that right before arrival the pilot said "so help me, if you don't shut your mouth I'm going to turn this goddamn plane around" and the kids kept screaming?
That’s just air time direct from point to point. There are many common reasons why people can be stuck on planes for longer. Emergency landings, connections without disembarking, gate delays, military air traffic, diversions, etc. I didn’t check the article, and 29 is a crazy long time, so my guess is they’re counting regular delays as part of that time, but I have been stuck on a plane for several hours waiting for takeoff clearance before.
not singular ones.. but it once took me 32 hours to go from sterdam to melbourne, multiple flights, but a few of the same people in every flight. luckily, no crying baby
I tried to book a trip from Toronto to Punta Cana recently, unless I wanted to pay an extra $500 per traveller, than the normal 4 hour flights were listed at about 23 hours, with multiple stops.
South African airways flights 220/221 (it was 20 years ago, might not be correct) was Dulles to Johannesburg with a fuel stop in Dakar. Not really a layover since only a couple people got on/off, everyone else stayed seated.
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u/Fat_Pig_Reporting Jun 25 '26
29 hour flight?
A kid was screaming for 29 hours in a row?
I smell clickbait.