Long flights....
 

I'm sure we all have stories of long flight - either through being diverted or delayed.

Yesterday's BA229 LHR-BWI was somewhat lengthier than normal: usually I reckon on c. 8 hours, but yesterday's flight was over 9 hours. It wasn't under any ETOPS restriction (that I know of) - particularly since we took a southerly route. The main issue seems to be down to two things: first a very strong headwind all the way, which meant that for large parts of the flight we were < 450 mph ground speed, and second, when we were over NY State we did a 120 turn and headed back towards eastern Long Island before heading down the east coast, supposedly due to 'airspace restrictions'. If the long flight wasn't enough, the bags took ages - first to make an appearance, then only a trickle of bags - eventually getting my 'priority' bag in the last half dozen or so some 70+ minutes after getting to the gate! :-(

I was a bit puzzled looking for the route you described until I realised that this must have been BA229!

An 8 hr flight is just a short hop for those of us who fly east....especially on the return.

LOL try 30 hours door to door - Liverpool -> MAN -> HKG -> FUK -> MYJ -> Home

(add cranky 16 month toddler in as well)

I fly Sydney-London and Sydney-New York regularly, so to be honest I have little sympathy for those who claim a long flight is anything less than 10 hours - especially if they are flying in a premium cabin.

On a TK flight from Jakarta I woke up over the Indian Ocean to see the trace on the screen going back to the origin! When I woke up again just outside Istanbul I asked and was told that quite often the route had to be varied, sometimes by a lot, because of weather conditions. I also remember flying to Ayer's Rock with the trip there from SYD taking about two hours longer than the trip back. Wind I was told.

... indeed - BA229 - now corrected - too long a flight!

... okay, should have been more specific - longer than normal flights... .

On the way to the UK our KA flight to HKG was delayed by irregular ops at HKG meaning it only got to FUK nearly 3hours late. This led to an..."interesting" time managing my daughter in the departures lounge.

As an aside the Chinese tourists at FUK sure do make use of the duty free - had the amusing sight of multiple pax breaking down duty free in to holdalls and leaving the boxes for FUK airport staff to clear up...

As soon as I saw the title 'long flight' I knew it would be by someone whose idea of a 'long flight' was relative only to their own experience rather than on the basis of what the shortest, longest and average flight times are. An 8 hour flight will never qualify as a long flight unless it is called that by someone who never takes a truly long flight.

I used to laugh when I was living in Europe when tourists would moan about a 3-4 hour flight as being too long. Someone from say London or Glasgow would moan about the difference in flight times to Greece vs. Spain and how they just couldn't handle a flight that was that 'long'. Hilarious. Some people need to get out more.

I do think however that to be fair, it is not unreasonable to complain about a delay adding on to a LONG DAY. Someone travelling from a small town to a major airport and then from their arrival airport to their final destination in another small town may well have a 30 hour total door to door travel time even though their actual flight time might have only been 8 hours and when that happens, any delay seems like too much.

Happily, I was on a (virtually) opposite routing on last night's BA 216 (IAD-LHR). Our flight time was 6:24, vs the scheduled 7:25. Ground speed was pushing 700mph for quite a chunk of the flight. Obviously that meant that the last 15 mins of the flight were spent (presumably with a bunch of other east coast arrivals) circling over north London, waiting for 6am to tick by...

Strong headwinds. All westbound flights were taking a while yesterday.

Dancing around in the atlantic on the way back from PUJ the other week our 7h40 flight became 9hrs15. In fairness the flightdeck were doing their best to avoid storm cells on an overnight flight so pax could sleep and even then there were some heavy bumps on the way. Was quite amusing to watch the map keep showing us as determined to reach australia at times ( obvious exaggeration). Will say I did wonder just how much spare fuel we had left but confidence was high in the crew so I decided to focus more on depleting the club kitchen

No wonder! I was in the AA Flounge in JFK yesterday afternoon. I noticed all the arrivals from LHR were going to be ~20 minutes late and I was wondering why!