SQ22: 18 hours in the air.

Hooray. My old dream has come true - to ride a flight Singapore - New York. This is the longest flight in the world, and probably in general in the history of civil commercial transportation. It flies for 18-19 hours (depending on the wind at the echelon), without any landings at all, at one filling station, 16 thousand kilometers from point to point.

// Rather, the longest-longest is his "brother", that is, return flight from New York to Singapore, it is 15 minutes longer, the wind blows like that up there :)

"De jure" to fly to New York in only 5 and a half hours: the plane leaves at 12:30 in the afternoon and arrives at 18:00 in the evening of the same day. Yeah, you guessed it right - departure is Singapore time, and arrival is Eastern American. But it still sounds more optimistic than "eighteen hours in an iron can ... with Singaporean stewardesses" :)

Well, on such an optimistic note, you can load into this flying unit. Specially adapted Airbus A340-500s operate on this route. It takes only 100 passengers, there is no economy - all seats are only business class.

Well, away we go ... ...

13:02 - overclocking.
13:03 - let's fly.

The plane accelerates and takes off slowly, hard, roll. "A barrel of kerosene, tail and wings" - I thought. This is true. If you believe Wikipedia, then 220 thousand liters of kerosene are poured into this barrel. Probably half of the luggage compartment is a huge additional fuel tank.

220 thousand liters per 100 travelers plus the crew - almost 2 thousand liters per snout !! Oh, it’s a little embarrassing to fly this side, which spits irreplaceable natural resources into nowhere like that ... Well, what to do? You have to fly ...

It is precisely because of the suboptimal fuel consumption and the rise in oil prices that Singaporeans decided to cancel this flight - the company stops flights on this route on November 23 of this (2013) year, i.e. in about a week! For more details read “Why the longest flights are saying So Long” on Bloomberg Businessweek on paper or.

We were lucky - in a few days this flight will be canceled forever, and we ... And we! They made it to the very end of this fantastic air marathon. "Caught by the tail" - said my casual fellow traveler TT. (this is him in the photo at the airport just above).

13:30 - we are still gaining altitude, we are flying for half an hour - and we climbed only 7 thousand. meters.
(here, above and further, I indicate the time at the point of departure).

Singapore and the northeastern United States are located almost opposite to each other in longitude, so it seems like it's all the same to fly - to the right of the North Pole through Japan-Kamchatka-Alaska or to the left of it, through Siberia, Scandinavia and Greenland. Rather, on the contrary - in reverse order. NYC - Greenland - Northern Europe - rushed south-east ...

By the way, Singapore lines seem to be the only airline that covers the whole world in a circle. From them there are flights west to Houston (Singapore-Moscow-Houston) and east to New York. Oh how! The Malaysians also seem to be trying to catch up with them - once I saw a Malaysian plane in Buenos Aires (!!)

14:05 - we have been flying for an hour, towards Japan and Kamchatka (hurray!). Fly another 17 hours ...

What to do all this time ?? - any normal person will be horrified (a normally flying person ... or rather, a normally flightless person). The first step is to get into the mail and process all the letters that have fallen on me over the past few days (there is not enough time to do this “on the ground”, I clean up the blockages in the planes). And then - bummer! The battery went down, and the sockets in my and the next chair turned out to be inoperative! Figase Singapore Airlines, famous for its quality of passenger service ... I had to run to recharge in the tail of the plane, where there was a free space with a working outlet (it was somehow too lazy to change from my already heated seat) :)

15:10 - fed something delicious South-East Asian ...

15:50 - we are flying over Manila.

16:15 - the second battery in the laptop sat down (the first was half empty at once, that's why it was so fast). I watched some kind of Hollywood mutton with a stupid plot, idiotic texts, director's jambs, etc. I thought - after all, if this is being filmed, then some unfortunate people are watching it? On such a sad note, I began to watch (and in some places just squander) the second Hollywood mutton :)

18:55 - we are flying over Tokyo.

And then transfer to another flight, towards the American hinterland ... Everyone - until the next reports!