New 17.5-Hour Flight From Australia To London Will Be The Longest In The World

Qantas just announced a new route that will take passengers from Perth to London. But you might want to stock up on sleeping pills. Because with a total flight time of 17.5 hours, it will be the longest nonstop flight in the world.



File photo of Qantas Airlines flights (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

The flight from Perth to London is 14,466km and will take place on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliners that Qantas will be acquiring next year. The 17.5-hour flight will beat the previously longest flight from Dubai to Auckland, New Zealand on Emirates Airlines. That flight stretches 14,199km and takes 16 hours and 35 minutes.

The new Perth to London flights aren’t expected to begin until March of 2018, but Perth is already positioning itself as a new international hub that will link the South Pacific to Europe. As it happens, I’m currently in Perth and had quite a long journey to get here. It was 14 hours from Los Angeles to Sydney and another five (?) hours to Perth. I want to say five hours, but I honestly have no idea. After that first stretch of 14 hours I thought I was going to die and was just thankful that the last bit wasn’t nearly as long as the first.

I guess it’s all better than the travel times of the 1930s. Back in 1938 a trip from London to Brisbane (the longest on offer at the time) took 11 days and had over two dozen scheduled stops.

Tickets for the new route from Perth to London go on sale in April 2017 but prices have yet to be announced. After my own trip from Los Angeles I think I’d pay twice as much just to go by steamship. I honestly don’t even know if that’s still a thing and I’m frankly too jetlagged to look it up.

[ABC Australia]