What is the longest flight you've ever been on?

These weren't non-stop, just in one 24 hour period.

Auckland-Sydney-Los Angeles-Dallas-New Orleans

Non-stop -- Hong Kong --> London

I forget which is was longer but:

NYC to Johannesburg

NYC to Shanghai

JFK to HKG. A little over 16 hours. Cathay Pacific first class and it was fantastic.

Philadelphia-Chicago-Tokyo.

Chicago-Portland-Seoul-Taipei

NYC to Osaka, Japan. I think it was 13 hours (memory is fuzzy this was the 90’s).

What’s notable is that going there, JLA made some sort of mistake and, as we were checking in, had to bump our entire group of five up to first class. We were like… wha? No extra charge. We spent the whole flight in giant retractable lounge chair seats watching movies on our own tv sets and being served endless meals of sushi and coffee and liquor and were waited on hand and foot. They even offered free mini massages. What a luxury! I arrived in Japan feeling fresh and rested.

On the way back though they definitely did not make the same mistake and reality hit hard. I was stuck in a middle seat center row for what felt like years. Really made me appreciate finer things.

I was on a military charter on KAL. A 747. Headed to my first Navy command in Yokosuka Japan. I loved it. I didn’t want the plane to land.

LA to Auckland. It was 17 hours, I think.

I watched 4 movies. It was awful

I've never board a plane

Non stops: San Francisco-Sydney 15.5 hours London-Singapore 13 hours Buenos Aires - Paris 13 hours

London - Singapore, very hung over. Singapore Airways business class, thank God.

Singapore - Taiwan - Anchorage - NYC. It took about 22 hours, all business class, mostly China Airlines, not so great.

LA to Melbourne Australia - 15 hrs

Houston - Dubai and Dubai - Los Angeles (15 hours each I think). Emirates Business in older aircraft with regular biz seats rather than lie-flat individual pods. Those weren't all that great, but the crew were terrific.

Orlando FL to Chennai India - 23 hrs with a stop of a couple of hours in Heathrow to change planes.

It’s so so so much better in business or first class than coach.

So weird that having just a little bit more room and flight attendants being nice to you makes an amazing difference

Longest "single" flight was Dulles to Johannesburg. We did have to land in Dakar to re-fuel. But the longest travel was Zimbabwe to Johannesburg to DC to Chicago to Moline,

Got an obscenely good deal on a business class flight from JFK to Sydney. But it flew from JFK to Abu Dhabi, then Abu Dhabi to Sydney. Took 36 hours with layovers I think, 26 hours in the air total. And it was actually very fun because Etihad airlines business class is really, really good. Would never do it again though.

NY to HK - switched planes en route to Asia (Singapore, Thailand, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai) monthly for several years.

LA to Sydney - started in NY and changed planes in LA.

SFO-Boston-Frankfurt-Athens. Twenty-three hours including stops. Pan fucking Am 1989.

I don't think I could do more than 9 hours - especially if it involved crossing the international date line.

Must be weird to land in Los Angeles BEFORE you took off from Sydney. Or, going the other way, it must be strange to lose almost a whole day flying from LA to Sydney.

Houston to Jakarta: Houston-Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Tokyo, Tokyo to Singapore, had to spend night in hotel Airport. Early flight from Singapore to Jakarta. That wasn't our final destination. We had lunch in Jakarta then got on a small island hopper to Kalimantan, stayed the night at my relative's house then back on a plane Bali the next morning.

R17, Moline is quite an endpoint!

12 hours to Seoul

My PHL-CHI-TKO was 20 hours altogether including layovers. I was afraid to go to sleep because I didn’t want to miss out on any meals. So I just had the stewardess come to wake me up when it was time to eat 🤤🤗

My beginnings as a fat whore should be quite evident…

Non-stop:

Atlanta - Cape Town (~14hours)

Newark-Delhi or Mumbai (~13)

Longest travel day:

Sharm-el-Sheikh > Cairo > London > Newark (in total with layovers etc. about 24 hours)

r23 Almost as good as Carbondale

Non Stop

Vancouver-Bejing...13 hours

Non-stop: LAX to Melbourne. That was one leg of a 3-leg itinerary over 36 hours

YYZ - LAX: 5 hours in the air LAX - MEL: 16.5 hours in the air (Qantas - fantastic economy class service aboard their A380) MEL - AUK: 3.5 hours in the air

The flight from Paradise to “Me”… I’m still on it.

London - Dubai - Dar es Salaam

Chicago-London

Dubai-LAX for a single flight.

Not sure about a sequence of flights ... maybe Sao Paulo-Houston-LAX? Or LAX-Amsterdam-Nairobi?

From Ork to Boulder, Colorado.

A NY to San Francisco nonstop flight that felt like a 24-hour flight as I was a cigarette smoker at the time.

Auckland-LA-Portland

All of them that had screaming babies or temper tantrum throwing toddlers.

Los Angeles to Jakatra, Indonesia on an ancient Garuda 747. 18 hours each way in the smallest economy middle seat ever. I was sick on the flight back - it seemed endless.

London to Johannesburg. 12 hours. Weirdly, Joburg is in the same timezone as London, so no jetlag after such a long flight. I flew there for Xmas 2019 and was so, so ill. I'm now convinced I had Covid during that trip.

In 2 weeks I am flying London to Cancun which is 11 hours.

I'll be flying from Dallas to Santiago next month - 10 hours non-stop down. Connecting through Miami on the way back, 14 hours with layover.

Six days from San Francisco to Hong Kong on a Pan Am China Clipper, with refueling stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, and Manila.

1 week business trip from hell: Amsterdam - Moscow - Bangkok - Seoul - Dulles - Philadelphia - Amsterdam. The Bangkok - DC leg was straight through (although Incheon is a fantastic airport).

LAX-Miami-Buenos Aires

Dallas to Tokyo, in premium economy and on a Japanese airline. It was quite pleasant.

Joburg to Atlanta, followed by Sydney to Joburg

R42 that sounds brutal. Reminds me of an old business trip I took from Denver to Geneva to Hong Kong to San Fran and back to Denver. Awful.

R39 I've done LGW to Cancun. It wasn't too bad.

Frankfort, Germany to NYC to LA to Tokyo to Shanghai. Absolute hell, even in business class.

Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia > Beijing Capital International Airport. 8 long years. And counting. We took off in March of 2014!

Don’t know when this damn pilot is going to land the plane we’re running out of snacks.

LA to London, but it was a private jet and I had a cheeky wank in the bathroom while the missus was asleep.

[quote]Frankfort, Germany

Frankfort is the capital of Kentucky.

I’m a pussy compared to you guys!

NY to SFO, ~6 hours. And, like r35, I’m a smoker, so it sucked.

I don’t know how some of you guys fly these vast differences. I don’t want to do anything I [italic]want[/italic] to do for 12-14 hours, much less be cooped up in a plane.

I was stuck out if town when I was 17 and had to buy a last minute ticket to get home. From San Diego to Ontario I think it took like 20 minutes flying time and it cost $33 dollars. God I miss PSA.

Don't laugh...but it was an 11-hour flight from--wait for it--Houston Hobby to New Orleans.

It was an absolute nightmare...a year or so before Southwest's epic holiday meltdown.

So bad that Southwest immediately refunded every passenger's fare without waiting for the inevitable demands.

Also, when our checked bags arrived at baggage claim in New Orleans (believe me, if we hadn't checked bags, we would have abandoned the flight when they pulled back to the gate for the first of a few times), everything was absolutely soaked. After a sleepless night, I spent the next morning at a seedy New Orleans coin laundry drying husband's and my clothes.

I still don't fly Southwest. I just don't trust them.

CDG (Paris) to SFO (San Francisco) via Air France. Supposedly takes 11 hours & 40 minutes. I was in economy, almost in the rear of the plane, but it was comfortable and I do remember free wine and bread throughout the flight.

Houston to Amsterdam non-stop. It was 10 hours or so but it felt interminable. I brought a Stephen King short story collection and there was a story about immediate transportation and how someone stayed awake during the jump and said that it was forever and I felt it. I should have asked my mom for some diphenhydramine and slept.

Non stop LAX to Tel Aviv.

Dubai/Doha to Sydney, too many times to count. From 13 to 15 hrs. Loved Emirates.

Why R54?

34 years and 3 and half months… feels like 54 years… 🙄

New York to Honolulu was 11 hours. I slept most of the way. .. But honestly the flight that seemed like the longest was from Los Angles to Eugene. It should only take a little over two hours, but we were stuck in the plane on the tarmac in San Francisco for well over three hours due to bad weather. This was before the current "3-hour rule" where they're mandated to let people deplane after that long, if they want. I was flying alone and thought I was going to go crazy. .. Then, when we finally did take off, about 20 minutes into the flight, the plane was struck by lightning twice. The young newlywed Christian couple sitting next to me was praying.

Longest flight: 8 hrs Philadelphia to London. It was also my first plane ride ever (starting my study abroad semester). I was nervous as hell but was travelling with another student I knew from thee exchange program & we were staying in a hostel room together. Then I get paged at the gate & pick up the phone: my travelling buddy's grandma died so he wasn't coming for another week. Nervousness x10. It went fine though. Was a night flight and was not even half full, so very quiet & I had no one sitting near me so that helped.

In 1987 I switched from living with my Mom to my Dad. She put me on a flight from SFO-Kimpo, the original Seoul airport. That was my freshman year of high school and the first of many trans-pacific flights I enjoyed. I believe the average flight time was around 14hrs.

Since then, for fun/vacation I have flown AFO-SYD, LAX-ACK, and ATL-JNB (thought th real marathon was the return flight home, JNB-GRU-MIA-BOS)

Professionally, I’ve enjoyed flying the 16hr JFK-DEL and it’s 17hr return.

Back to when I was a kid: in 1987, but also a time before when I was sent to live with my dad in Japan I boarded a PanAm 747 and fell in love with aviation. The idea that for 10-12 or even more hours people could exist with the comforts of normal life on the ground, but in the air, captivated me.

Seats, movies, service were one thing. But the kitchens, ovens, and service equipment were another level. Friendly stewardesses (temporally accurate kiddos!) genteel boarding lounges and all-around airport areas only added to the elevated class of atmosphere/experience.

It was amazing. And I was very lucky to have experienced it then. Today’s equivalent of flying a JetBlue narrowbody JFK-LHR Is abhorrent, IMO. Yet I think more people would rather jump at that than riding in a real, wide-bodied aircraft built for the task.

DFW to LAX to Sydney - 18 hours

The last leg was a United flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne, with a stop in Sydney. It was business class, which was the upper level of a 747. It was nice and I didn’t mind the flight time at all. The return flight was business class on Hawaiian from Sydney to Honolulu, layover, then American from Honolulu to Dallas, so it was broken up, but I liked the longer LAX to SYD flight better without the break.

Atlanta to Hong Kong. All combined it took over 24 hours, which included 2 layovers in LA and Seoul of a couple hours each.

Thankfully, back in those days (late 80s) our company had a policy that if any flight was over 2 hours we could fly first class. If I'd had to fly coach all that distance you'd still be seeing YouTube videos me being removed from the plane by police. After the LA layover coach was packed to the gills with squalling Korean & Chinese babies and Indians ranting about everything or demanding to use the toilets in 1st class.. I well remember all the stewardii vociferously apologizing to everyone about all the noise from cattle class. The team head who was working the 1st class section had to go back more than a couple times to demand people calm down. Eventually even one of the pilots came out and gave the people back there a good talking to. It helped, but wasn't perfect. I finally took 2 Benadryl and knocked myself out. Thankfully by the time I woke up most of the people in coach had finally worn themselves out and fallen asleep.

Now that I'm an old man, long retired, I'd rather die than get on another flight that long.