Oh joy. Oh bliss. Another interminably long flight. How wonderful.
Thank you, China, for offering this wonderful breakthrough. It will allow so many of us to slowly lose our minds like William Shatner in that one episode of The Twilight Zone on a flight that is so long it feels like you should be landing on another planet by the time it’s done.
China Eastern Airlines is about to test the limits of both aviation and human butt endurance with a new Shanghai–Buenos Aires route that clocks in at a crazy 20,000 kilometers, or 12,427 miles.
The inaugural flight leaves Shanghai on December 4 at the openly hostile hour of 2 a.m., hops to Auckland for a quick 2-hour-25-minute breather, then heads straight into the open Pacific before touching down in Argentina around 4:30 p.m. local time.
Total travel time: just shy of 26 hours. That’s a full day of flying with enough time left over to realize you still haven’t adjusted your watch.
China Just Debuted the World’s Longest Flight
The return trip is even worse: 29 hours in the air with another Auckland intermission. At that point, might as well offer passengers the option to be medically knocked out for the duration of the flight.
Starting this week, the route will run every Tuesday and Thursday. China Eastern hasn’t come out and said why they’re introducing a flight so long. My theory of it being a part of a nationalistic d—k measuring contest is probably the real reason that no one will ever speak of.
But if you want a more practical reason, it could be that China is rolling out a new unilateral visa-exemption agreement. And Argentina is eager for stronger ties with its largest buyer of beef, soy, and lithium. So this is all a part of the global trade version of “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
As for the whole “world’s longest flight” part of it, that is for sure a d—k measuring contest that airlines love to partake in. The reigning champion was a Singapore Airlines marathon flight from Singapore to New York, which covered over 15,000 kilometers in 18 hours.
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