What’s the longest flight or bus trip you’ve ever taken?
Singapore Airlines debuts an 18-hour, 45-minute flight: the world’s longest. How can anyone survive it? (Can anyone say, “free wine”?)
Greetings, welcome back, this is Plain English. I’m Jeff; JR is the producer; and this is episode number 95. Transcripts, as always with our famous interactive translations, are available at PlainEnglish.com/95. The email address if you’d like to get in touch, is [email protected] or [email protected]. It all depends on which one of us you want to talk to.
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Singapore Airlines re-introduces world’s longest flight
Singapore Airlines re-launched the longest flight in the world last week, a 10,300-mile beast of a flight—that’s over 16,500 kilometers. It goes from Singapore to Newark, New Jersey (outside New York City) and is scheduled to take 18 hours and 45 minutes.
Eighteen hours. And forty-five minutes. That is now officially the longest flight in the world, edging out a flight from Aukland, New Zealand to Doha, Qatar, in the Middle East, which is about an hour shorter. Singapore Airlines is flying a brand-new Airbus A350-900 Ultra Long Range airplane. The airline had flown this route between 2004 and 2013, but discontinued it because it was too expensive to operate and they could not do so profitably. But with the new generation of ultra-long range jets, made of lighter carbon fiber and with additional space for fuel, Singapore is hoping that its bet on this super-long-haul route will pay off.
The flight has all premium seats. With no traditional economy (or coach) seats, the airline is hoping that higher fares contribute to the route’s profitability. There are 67 business-class seats and 94 “premium economy” seats. Premium economy seats are a new thing in the airline industry. For long-haul flights, they now offer something in between economy class and business class. You basically get a little extra legroom and generally upgraded food and drink options. So the smallest seats—those small airline economy seats of your nightmares—those are not on this flight, thankfully. Still, most of the seats don’t recline all the way, so passengers back in premium economy would have to survive the whole time sitting up, or maybe reclining back just a little. The arrangement is the so-called two-four-two arrangement, where there are two seats by one window, then an aisle, then four seats in the middle of the plane, another aisle, and two seats by the opposite window.
Here are a couple details from the first flights. You leave Singapore late at night—just after midnight. They serve you a meal in flight, and then turn the lights out for 12 straight hours. Twelve hours in the dark—that’s probably to keep all the passengers quiet. You can get drinks and sandwiches and snacks during the night. And then three hours before landing, they flip the lights back on and serve breakfast. All passengers get noise-canceling headphones to help you sleep or concentrate on entertainment.
What would you do for almost 19 hours? The airline offers 301 movies—that should get you through the first half of the flight—301 movies, 200 TV shows, and over 700 music selections. They also push around a cart of newspapers and magazines.
It would be important to get up and walk around a little: don’t try just sitting in your seat the whole time. That’s what I typically do; I usually don’t get up during a flight. But on a flight that long, you need to get some exercise. That’s because you can actually get a blood clot in your legs from sitting so long at such high altitude. You also want to drink plenty of water, since airline cabins have extremely dry air.
Here’s a fun fact—or a not so fun fact if you’re listening to this in the air on a long-haul flight: the way you taste food is actually different at high altitude. That’s right—airline food is notoriously bad, but there’s a scientific reason for that. Part of the way you experience food is through tasting it, sure, but also through smelling it. And when you’re up so high with lower air pressure and drier air, you can’t smell the food you’re tasting. So the chefs who craft an in-flight menu have to deal with ingredients that will dry out faster, and they need to give you more flavorful food to make up for the fact that you’re not smelling it. There’s even a beer called Betsy specifically brewed to be consumed in the air, but it’s not available on Singapore Airlines.
If it sounds hard being a passenger, it’s probably not easy working that flight either. I’m usually pretty beat after a 12 hour day; I can only imagine what it’s like to work this flight. The crew includes four pilots and thirteen flight attendants to serve the 150-odd passengers.
After about 18 hours in the air, the world’s longest flight lands in Newark the same day at about 5:30 in the morning. Not bad, leave at midnight, spend 18 hours in the air, and get off the plane at 5:30 am. You could be in your office in Manhattan working by about eight. Yeah right—if that were me, I’d have to sleep all day to recover!
I’m trying to think now of the longest flights I’ve ever taken. I think the longest flight I’ve ever experienced is eight and a half hours. I’ve been to India three times for work, but each time I connected in London and I think that London to Delhi flight is eight and a half hours. And I had to do Hawaii twice for work; that was back when I was living in New York. That’s an 11-hour flight, but I chose to take a connecting flight instead, so it was broken up a little bit. I think for a long-haul trip like that, I’d much rather have a connection even if it adds a little time to the journey. On my way to India, I liked to get off the plane in London and have breakfast at one of the restaurants, browse the shops, stretch my legs. Eighteen hours on a plane—it makes my legs cramp up just thinking about it.
Hey one thing you might do if you find yourself on a long bus ride or plane ride is listen to an audiobook. I just finished a great book in English called Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. It was really, really good and I remember thinking that the vocabulary isn’t too difficult. And it’s available as an audiobook on Audible. If you can get your hands on the printed book, you might also enjoy listening to the audiobook as you read along. Or if you’re up for a challenge, you can try listening without the text. Either way, you can get a free audiobook by going to PlainEnglish.com/book and signing up for a free trial. It’s a paid service, where you get one audiobook a month for about $15. But if you sign up for a free trial, you get a free book, and you can cancel within the trial period without paying anything. So check that out, PlainEnglish.com/book and search for any book you want to hear, but the one I just finished, Little Fires Everywhere, is a great place to start.
Great stories make learning English fun
