Say goodbye to the world's longest flight

By N.B. | WASHINGTON, DC

IF you're the kind of business traveller who loves flights—especially super-long ones—I have some bad news: Singapore Airlines' flights 21 and 22, the longest commercial services in the world, are scheduled for cancellation. The two all-business-class flights, which operate between Singapore and Newark, New Jersey, take around 19 hours and cover 9,525 miles (15,329 km). But late last month, Singapore airlines announced that it would be cancelling the services, along with another between Singapore and Los Angeles that is almost as long.

The title for the world's longest flight, reports Ben Mutzabaugh of USA Today, will now shift to Qantas, which operates a 8,576-mile service between Sydney and Dallas. Singapore Airlines is scrapping its record-holding services as part of a massive new deal with Airbus. Under the terms of the agreement, Singapore will get five new A380s and 20 new A350s, and the manufacturer will buy back the A340-500s that the airline uses on its super-long-haul routes. But those explanations will do little to comfort the business travellers and long-haul-flight enthusiasts who will now be missing out. CNN spoke to one of them:

Business traveller Charles Yap is a big fan of this route because it avoids a connection in Germany, which he says saves six hours. All 100 seats aboard the flight are business class. Add hundreds of in-flight movie choices, and longhaul travel isn't so bad for this Discovery Channel executive.

"If you're stuck on a flight, you might as well enjoy it," says Yap, 39.

As CNN notes, high fuel prices are the underlying force that's driving these cancellations. As prices have risen, twin-engine planes such as the A350, the Boeing 777 and the new 787 Dreamliner have come to dominate super-long-haul routes, displacing gas-guzzling four-engine planes. (The A340, which Singapore Airlines was using on the Newark route, is a four-engine plane.) For 19-hour flights to return, America's Federal Aviation Administration would probably have to do away with a longstanding rule that requires two-engine planes to stay within a certain distance of runways where they can land in case of trouble. (Four-engine planes are not subject to this rule.) Engines are leaps and bounds more reliable than they were decades ago, and modern two-engine planes can fly on one engine without too much trouble. It's worth taking another look at the rule.