I had a wedding to attend in Jakarta and made the decision to travel to that city for first time since living there in the 1980s. I don’t remember that much about it, except the traffic was pretty rough. And I can only imagine it got worse with the massive increase in population over the last few decades.

And given my recent defection to British Airways, I don’t get that many opportunities to travel SQ. My trips to Thailand are now focused on Tier Points (Cathay Pacific) or cost (JetStar). So when I do get “forced” to flying Singapore Airlines, I do try to make the most of it! And I generally love it — you can see my last SQ trip report to Manila here, where I got to travel Business Class on the way home.

I needed to get to Jakarta for a Friday, and from Singapore that would mean leaving on a Thursday evening. I had a choice, to take the slightly earlier flight in the evening at or the really late flights. Unfortunately there are no One World carriers that fly the route I need for this trip which was Singapore to Jakarta. So I was left to choose from a whole bunch of airlines which flies direct – Singapore Airlines, Tiger, JetStar, Lion, Garuda, Batik Air. As such I decided to fly SQ. The outbound flight was due to be a Boeing 777-300, while the return was scheduled to be an Airbus 350-900, which was very exciting for me as I had been reading about the decision by Singapore Airlines to re-start their non-stop US routes.

The proposed Ultra-Long Range airplane is to be a reconfigured A350-900, so if I got a chance to try out the “basic” model, it would give me a sense of what it would be like to travel the non-stop flight. Now there are already people discussing what the configuration of this new long hauler would be and also where it would go. According to some reports there will be 170 seats in the A350-900 ULR compared to the 400 seats in a standard A350-900. I think they will definitely have a lot of business class seats just for the revenue. Probably for comfort (and revenue) they will only opt for Premium Economy seats and drop the standard Economy seats. If I remember correctly on their SQ21/SQ22 flights they initially began with Executive Economy (an ancestor to the current Premium Economy) and Business Class, before eventually switching to an all Business Class configuration. And if they have done their maths and market research correctly, it would nice to see them introduce a mini cabin of First of maybe 4 seats. But my suspicion is that they will go for the Business and Premium Economy configuration. [On a side note, I thought it was rather convenient that Singapore Airlines introduced a Premium Economy seating in 2015, and then a few months later announced the purchase of the ULR planes. Of course some readers would say that it was simply because they were trying to compete with other airlines that had already introduced a Premium Economy cabin, and of course I think that had something to do with it. However I would argue that they knew that this ULR design was already on the drawing boards, and SQ might have wanted to test out a) the seats and b) demand for them.]

Then there is a the question of destination. Of course they are pretty much guaranteed to restart their previous direct US routes to Los Angeles and New York, which is what they pretty much said in their press release. However, where else? Would it be possible to fly to Houston without stopping? Probably not. Using Travel Math, it works out to be around 9,700nm, while the A350-900 ULR is likely to only have a range of 8,700nm. While I would personally like to see places like Vancouver restarted I’m not sure about the business case – they after all stopped that service back in 2009 (and that was already via Seoul). Anyway, I am looking forward to it either way. Roll on 2018!!

hmmmm interesting … I seem to have gone completely off on a tangent. So let me get back to the flight .... and at that point ... I will leave you hanging ...

More to come

Of course, you can catch all my travel and food excitement on the globetrekka website