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By Meredith Carey, Condé Nast Traveler
It's official: Singapore Airlines will restart its nearly 19-hour non-stop between Newark International Airport and Singapore Changi Airport and on October 12. But the real date you need to mark on your calendar is May 31, when tickets for this record-setting flight go on sale. There's no official pricing yet, but since the plane doesn't offer coach—only 67 business class and 94 premium economy seats—you can bet they'll cost more than those $99 hops to Iceland.
The flight—which will upset Qantas's seven-month stint as the record holder, thanks to the 17-hour, 9,009-mile non-stop from Perth to London—has been a looooong time coming. After Singapore Airlines discontinued the ultra-long-haul flight from Newark to Singapore in 2013 due to rising fuel costs, Traveler's Cynthia Drescher reported as early as October 2015 that the airline's SIN-EWR route was coming back to claim the "world's longest flight" crown. It's now back, and all thanks to the cutting-edge Airbus A350-900ULR, which can fly up to 20 hours without refueling and is more energy-efficient that planes before it. Plus, the plane's technology fights jet lag as you fly, with a lighting system that mimics the daylight at your destination and an air circulation system that refreshes the air every two minutes and regulates the in-flight temp so you don't need to pile on the thin airplane blankets.
Would you fly almost a full day (the flight time is exactly 18 hours and 45 minutes) without stopping? Our editors weighed in earlier this month, with a few "Oh God nos" but plenty of "hell yeses." After all, "Singapore Airlines isn’t Greyhound... It’s an uninterrupted day of someone else taking care of you, like a spa in the sky—that’s how good Singapore Air’s service is," writes Deputy Digital Director Laura Dannen Redman. Who'll join her?
