Chrisinhouston

WaPo had a travel article the other day on how several airlines are offering trips to nowhere. Basically it said a lot of frequent flyer miss the experience so they can now buy a ticket to take off, fly around for a few hours and land at the same airport. Quantas was mentioned as doing this out of SYD. And it's not so cheap:

"The 134 available seats on offer quickly vanished at prices that ranged from $787 to $3,787 in Australian dollars, the equivalent of $575 and $2,765, according to Reuters."

Wonder if United might offer these at some point?


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...mains-stalled/

LondonElite

I can't imagine anything more pointless than this. Possibly if there is some viewing aspect to it (and not EWR - circling around southern New Jersey - EWR), but spending money to sit in an aluminium tube with a few hundred other people only to end up where you started from seems nutty, and wasteful.

sgopal2

There are a few airlines in Kathmandu that do this. Every morning a oneway/nostop/roundtrip flight to "Mountain". Great views of the Annapurna range. They've been doing this in Nepal for many years. Really great way to view Everest. The flights are sold out on most days.

So it makes sense for the airlines to do this if they can make money.

gmt4

I can't see this happening in the US. Airlines take govt bailout money then make pointless flights that don't serve any mail/cargo/passenger needs? There would be uproar.

Miles Ahead

And what happens if someone gets infected on said flight?

LondonElite

Presumably the same thing that happens when someone gets infected on any other flight.

Gabdawg

I don't think it makes sense for a country as large as the US and diverse in geography as the US. The reason, we can freely fly within the US with very few exceptions. There are hundreds of flights a day. Somewhere strict lock downs and travel bans like Singapore or Taiwan it does make sense.

jmastron

Yeah, the airline/cruise line/whoever claims they didn't know, that it didn't seem like COVID until it did, that they took precautions, not their fault etc...

In places with very low infection rates, I suppose this isn't that bad of an idea if people really want to fork over money, but in the US I personally think it would be pretty irresponsible to even offer such a thing, much less take it. My opinion only!

hotelboy

I wonder what Gretta must be thinking.

ExplorerWannabe

Qantas is used to this since they regularly have flights going down over Antarctica for sightseeing and then returning to the same airport hours later. I was always tempted to do that but am usually busy with work or family at that time of year.

In the US. an airline could do a circuit in the west going over the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rushmore, Badlands, Yellowstone, perhaps going over by Mt Hood and/or Mt Rainier. In the east, a flight that went up the Northeast so you could take in DC, Philadelphia, New York, Cape Cod from the air then headed over Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, coming back in over Chicago and then over West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley before returning to Washington-Baltimore area would be spectacular sights. Of course, both of those would be long-haul in duration so smaller segments could be used.

A sightseeing flight-to-nowhere makes INCREDIBLE sense for a country with as diverse geography as the US. Yes, you can see it all yourself from ground level but driving to all those locations takes a lot of time and it's still not like seeing it from the air. The thing that I think might be tougher would be getting permission to fly at lower-than-normal altitudes in order to see the sights better.

I can see a lot of people saying they've flown those segments before but a lot of people get on a flight like they board a bus and don't really look at what they're flying over. You can see that in the window shades up/down debates here. I happen to enjoy looking at our fascinating planet so I'm in the "up" crowd.

HNLbasedFlyer

It seems to me - burning a bunch of fossil fuel for no real purpose - is a really bad idea.

Doppy

I think as Gabdawg mentioned above, the fact that you can still fly anywhere you want in the US means there's not really a strong case for doing something like this. In Singapore you can't fly anywhere domestic; in the US you can fly everywhere. If you miss flying in the US, you can just book a flight.

DELee

Yup. Everyday. The problem is, UA keeps cancelling those flights due to "light loads".

David

TomMM

Plenty of places to go.

garykung

No. At the minimum:

1. UA is still offering domestic short-haul flights.

2. Many of the airlines offering flights to nowhere only have or do not have a domestic market. For example, SQ is a purely international airline given that Singapore is a city state, and BR forgoes the domestic market to B7 (Uni Air, a sister company of EVA Air).

Bottom line - when discouraged, no one actually stops you from getting on a plane in the U.S. now.