Despite a couple of very long flights (east coast of the US to Japan, Australia, and South Africa) the subjectively longest flight was Detroit to Boston. It was the second leg of a flight that started in South Bend. My flight out of South Bend departed half an hour early because a big storm was coming in. How big? It shut down O’Hare for a day. So everyone who was there piled into the plane and we took off. They hadn’t completely refreshed it, and a lot of the seats were missing barf bags.
This was before 9/11, it was a little plane (one seat opposite two, or maybe 1x1) and I, in the front row, didn’t have my own window but had a nice view of the cockpit and the windshield the pilots were looking out of.
They literally steered around thunderheads by sight as the plane bounced and thrashed around. Sometimes there was no view at all due to the sheets of water. We saw lightening from cloud to cloud nearby.
The only thing keeping me calm was that the pilots didn’t look concerned.
Then, after a brief layover, I boarded a giant plane (probably a 727, but it felt huge in contrast) and I was in the very last row. The flight was completely smooth, except for ordinary “sway”, and completely boring. But I felt like I was bouncing around the whole time. And THAT flight was interminable.
Wellington to San Antonio. The main hope was Auckland to Houston: a bit over 16 hours. Sleep en route…didn’t happen. (Not that the flight was uncomfortable; I just have a lot of trouble dropping off on planes.)
And then, just four days later, back home again. I was nearly dead when I arrived.
When my sister took that long flight, my mother wanted to know how many times the plane would have to land and refuel, or if it would do that in the air. She replied that neither of those would be necessary, because the plane held enough fuel for a flight that long.
I flew Varig from SFO to Quito, I think, on the way to Sao Paulo. Lost all track of time. Free Beer and a ‘very freindy’ flight attendant made it seem way to short.
I’ve done that one, a few times. It’s about nine to ten hours, depending on routing (we were once routed off our great circle route, owing to severe weather over California).
Those flights were always part of longer trips to Australia. I’d change planes in Honolulu, headed for Sydney (another nine or ten hours); where I’d change planes for Perth (about six hours). Given the length of the flights, and the layovers, it was 30 hours in transit, in all. So, it wasn’t non-stop, as per the OP, but it was exhausting, both mentally and physically. If you asked me, upon my arrival in Perth, what day it was, I might have answered “John Elway.”
14 hours from Dallas to Frankfurt in an isle seat in business class back in 2004. Worst part was the guy across the isle took off his shoes and socks and had his bare feet (gnarley toe nails included) in the middle of the isle the whole time.
Longest actual flight time was 14 hrs 15 minutes (DFW - KIX Osaka/Kansai, Japan)
Longest time gate to gate for a single flight was 15 1/2 hrs (ORD to KIX normally about a 13-14 hr flight but delayed on tarmac due to heavy snowfall in Chicago).
Door to door, my overseas trips from the US to Japan were about 26-30 hours. Always worse going from West to East. Something about seeing 2 sunrises and sunsets in less then 24 hours messes with the brain.
18hrs 30mins from Doha to Auckland, that was after 6hrs getting to Doha from Stockholm, and then another 1hr 30mins from Auckland to Christchurch. And the joy of doing it all over again to get home!
In 2016 we flew on a nonstop flight on Hawaiian Airlines from NYC to Honolulu. That’s just shy of 5,000 miles. (We then got on a connecting flight to Maui.)
I think the first leg was about 10 hours. I remember contemplating the fact that after being on the flight for five hours we were only then heading out into the Pacific with our fuel half depleted and only two engines.
In 1988 I flew on a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, Germany. That was about 5,800 miles.
For me, the longest was Frankfurt to Los Angeles - if I remember correctly, it took 12 hours - which was preceded by an almost-as-long flight from Johannesburg to Frankfurt.
My dad was once flying from Boston to NYC (probably LaGuardia) and a snow storm was forecast. They made it to NYC but circled for a while before ATC closed the airport. Then they flew to Hardford, CT, but with other planes trying to land and the snow intensifying, they got shut out there. Same story in Providence, RI, so they flew back to Boston. Which closed.
So they flew north (the storm was coming up from the south), landed in Manchester NH, got bussed back to Boston in steadily falling snow and called it a day. Approximately 12 hours later, flying for 8 hours, 2 hours in a bus, and right where he started.
New York to Johannesburg. In coach. Horrible. And then back.
New York to Tokyo. Just as horrible. Then back again.
New York to Bangkok (and back). A bunch of times. Once I got bumped up to first class. I never did find out why. Changed the whole experience from misery into nothing worse than boredom.
That’s even worse than my story of waiting at the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware for several days trying to get a space-available military flight to Germany to visit my family. On the first day, I scored a flight, and was subsequently bumped by a higher-priority passenger. On the second day, I scored another flight, but it kept getting delayed, then was finally scrubbed.
On the third day, I scored a flight, actually boarded and took off on a C-5 Galaxy. Shortly after taking off, I went to sleep, because I had been sitting in the terminal for most of those three days waiting for a flight. About two hours later, I woke up when the passenger sitting next to me said, “Uh, oh…”
“What is it?”, I asked. “We’re turning,” he replied.
It was true. We were not yet to the halfway point across the Atlantic, and a compressor had failed. Because we were a hair closer to our departure point than our destination, we were turning back. I ended up taking a 6-hour flight on a C-5 from Dover to Dover.
I voted 12+ hours because that’s the non-stop flight time from Cape Town to Paris. But 24 hours is the time it takes when I fly to Houston (with one transfer in Dubai).
