World's Longest Non-Stop Flights: Key Statistics for 2026

Amy Lancelotte

By:  Amy Lancelotte

9 minutes read

Last Updated:  September 25, 2026

The longest scheduled passenger flight in the world covers 15,349 km (9,537 miles) without touching the ground. Singapore Airlines' New York JFK to Singapore service is timetabled at 19 hours 15 minutes gate to gate, and it has held the top spot since November 2020.

Why this matters: ultra-long-haul flights sit at the edge of what airliners, crews and passengers can handle, so small changes ripple through the rankings fast. In 2026, airspace closures over the Middle East pushed two of OAG's Summer 2026 top 10 routes off the non-stop map, while Qantas has fixed dates for Project Sunrise flights that would add another 1,667 km to the record from October 2027.

Key Statistics on the Longest Non-Stop Flights at a Glance

1. Singapore to New York JFK is the world's longest non-stop flight at 15,349 km (9,537 miles), flown daily by Singapore Airlines.
   Source: OAG, World's Longest Non-Stop Flights, Summer 2026; AirAdvisor great-circle calculation, 2026
2. Singapore to Newark is just 4 km shorter at 15,345 km, making Singapore Airlines the operator of the two longest routes on Earth.
   Source: OAG, World's Longest Non-Stop Flights, Summer 2026; AirAdvisor great-circle calculation, 2026
3. New York JFK to Singapore is scheduled at 19 hours 15 minutes, the longest block time of any passenger flight in September 2026.
   Source: Singapore Airlines SQ23 schedule as listed by FlightAware and FlightMapper, September 2026
4. All 10 of the longest non-stop routes flying in September 2026 exceed 13,700 km, and all 15 on our list exceed 13,350 km.
   Source: AirAdvisor analysis of airline schedules and flight records, 11-25 September 2026
5. Qantas flies 5 of the 15 longest non-stop routes, more than any other airline, and Singapore Airlines flies 4.
   Source: AirAdvisor analysis of airline schedules and flight records, September 2026
6. Two of OAG's Summer 2026 top 10 were not flying non-stop in September 2026: Qatar Airways' Auckland-Doha and Qantas' Paris-Perth.
   Source: OAG, Summer 2026 ranking; flight records, 11-25 September 2026
7. Qatar Airways resumed Auckland on 17 June 2026 after a three-and-a-half-month suspension, but with a stop in Adelaide instead of non-stop.
   Source: CAPA, Qatar Airways network update, 24 July 2026; FlightAware records for QR914/QR915, 11-25 September 2026
8. Qantas' Perth to London flight has stopped in Singapore since March 2026, while London to Perth is still scheduled non-stop at 16 hours 50 minutes.
   Source: Qantas, International network update, March 2026; Aerospace Global News, 21 August 2026; FlightAware flight records, September 2026
9. The average top-10 longest route grew 14.5% in 25 years, from 12,679 km in 2000 to 14,513 km in 2025.
   Source: OAG, The World's Longest Routes Go 15% Further, 14 May 2026; AirAdvisor great-circle calculation
10. The September 2026 top 10 averages 14,385 km, 128 km less than in 2025 after the Middle East reroutings.
    Source: AirAdvisor analysis, September 2026
11. In 2000, the Boeing 747-400 flew 9 of the 10 longest routes; in September 2026 no four-engine jet other than the A380 appears in the top 15.
    Source: OAG, The World's Longest Routes Go 15% Further, 14 May 2026; AirAdvisor analysis, September 2026
12. The Airbus A350-900 and Boeing 787-9 account for 12 of the 17 airline operations on the 15 longest routes.
    Source: AirAdvisor analysis of flight records, September 2026
13. Qantas plans daily Sydney-London non-stop flights from October 2027, a 17,016 km route, 10.9% longer than today's record.
    Source: Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise, accessed 25 September 2026
14. Qantas' first A350-1000ULR, named Vega, is due for delivery in April 2027; Sydney-New York follows from mid-2028.
    Source: Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise, accessed 25 September 2026
15. The Project Sunrise A350 will carry just 238 passengers, with more than 40% of seats in premium cabins.
    Source: Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise, accessed 25 September 2026
16. Airbus' A350-1000ULR test aircraft flew 12,460 nm in 24 hours 24 minutes on its Melbourne-Toulouse return leg in July 2026.
    Source: Airbus, Inside the A350-1000ULR's longest development flight, 28 July 2026

The World's 15 Longest Non-Stop Flights in September 2026

OAG's Summer 2026 schedule ranking is the industry reference, but two of its top 10 routes were not flying non-stop by September. The ranking below keeps only routes with non-stop passenger flights recorded between 11 and 25 September 2026, measured by great-circle distance, the shortest path between two airports over the Earth's surface.

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Source: AirAdvisor analysis of OAG, World's Longest Non-Stop Flights (Summer 2026, published April 2026), airline schedules and FlightAware flight records for 11-25 September 2026. Distances are great-circle, calculated on the WGS-84 ellipsoid. * London-Perth and Shenzhen-Mexico City are non-stop in one direction only.

Singapore dominates the top of the table. Its two New York routes are separated by only 4 km, and Singapore Changi also anchors the Los Angeles and San Francisco flights in 8th and 11th place. Two entries come with an asterisk: Qantas flies London to Perth non-stop but sends the Perth to London flight through Singapore, and China Southern flies Shenzhen to Mexico City non-stop but returns via Tijuana, a stop OAG attributes to Mexico City's high altitude, which limits take-off weight.

The Longest Flights by Scheduled Flight Time

Distance is only half the story. Scheduled block time, measured from pushback at the gate to arrival at the gate, depends on prevailing winds and routing, so the ranking by hours differs from the ranking by kilometres.

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Source: AirAdvisor compilation of airline schedules listed by FlightMapper and FlightAware for the week of 25 September 2026; longest scheduled flight in the longer direction of each route. Block time includes taxi time.

New York JFK to Singapore leads on both measures at 19 hours 15 minutes, five minutes ahead of Newark to Singapore. The biggest mover is New York JFK to Auckland: fifth by distance, it ranks third by time because Air New Zealand schedules its NZ1 flight at 17 hours 50 minutes against the prevailing winds. Dallas/Fort Worth to Melbourne follows at 17 hours 40 minutes, and Emirates' Dubai to Los Angeles flight, only 13th by distance, is timetabled at 17 hours 5 minutes, level with Auckland to Dubai.

Why the Same Route Takes Longer One Way

On five of the eight routes below, one direction is timetabled more than an hour longer than the other. The jet stream, the band of fast westerly winds at cruising altitude, helps eastbound flights and slows westbound ones, so airlines schedule more time for the direction flying into the wind.

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Source: AirAdvisor compilation of airline schedules listed by FlightMapper and FlightAware for the week of 25 September 2026; longest scheduled flight in each direction. The eight longest routes flown non-stop both ways are shown.

The gap is widest between New York JFK and Auckland, where the flight to Auckland is scheduled 1 hour 40 minutes longer than the flight back. Both Dallas/Fort Worth routes to Australia differ by 1 hour 30 minutes, and on every trans-Pacific route in the chart the westbound flight is the longer one. The most balanced routes are New York JFK-Singapore and New York JFK-Manila, both with a 35-minute gap, followed by Newark-Singapore at 45 minutes. Longer sectors also leave less slack when things go wrong, a pattern covered in our long-haul vs short-haul delay statistics.

Landed 3+ hours late after a long-haul flight?Flights departing the EU, such as Rome to Perth, are covered by EU261, up to 600 EUR per passenger. Flights departing the UK, such as London to Perth, are covered by UK261, up to 520 GBP.Check Your Flight

How Middle East Airspace Closures Reshaped the List

OAG's ranking was built from Summer 2026 schedules. By September, flight records show that two of its routes had stopped flying non-stop, both of them long-haul links between Australasia and Europe or the Gulf that were disrupted by the Middle East airspace closures.

Qatar Airways brought Auckland back on 17 June 2026 after a three-and-a-half-month suspension, with a stop in Adelaide, according to CAPA; it plans to switch that stop to Melbourne in December 2026. Qantas has routed Perth to London via Singapore since early March 2026 to avoid payload limits on the longer path around closed airspace, while London to Perth stays non-stop, and it moved the Sydney-Paris flight's stop from Perth to Singapore in April 2026, so no Paris-Perth non-stop flights appeared in September flight records. Seasonal and cancelled flying removed other contenders too: United's Houston-Sydney route (13,834 km) did not operate in September, and Air India dropped Bengaluru-San Francisco (14,003 km) from 1 March 2026, after airspace curbs had already forced refuelling stops on the route.

The Aircraft That Make Ultra-Long-Haul Possible

Twin-engine widebodies now fly almost all of the world's longest routes. Counting each airline separately on shared routes, the 15 longest routes add up to 17 airline operations.

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Source: AirAdvisor analysis of FlightAware flight records, 11-25 September 2026. Aircraft type as flown on the majority of recorded flights.

The Airbus A350-900 and Boeing 787-9 fly six operations each. Singapore Airlines uses the A350-900 on all four of its routes in the top 15, and it relaunched Newark in 2018 with a dedicated 161-seat ultra-long-range version, the A350-900ULR. The only four-engine jet left is the Airbus A380, used by Emirates to Auckland and Los Angeles and by Qantas between Sydney and Dallas/Fort Worth. The Boeing 777-200LR, once the ultra-long-haul specialist, no longer flies any of the top 15; Emirates still uses it between Dubai and Houston, which at 13,145 km sits just outside the top 15. For the wider picture of how these types are spreading, see our aircraft fleet size and growth statistics.

Which Airlines Fly the Longest Routes

Nine airlines operate the 15 longest non-stop routes, but two carriers based at the far ends of the network do most of the flying.

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Source: AirAdvisor analysis of airline schedules and FlightAware flight records, 11-25 September 2026. Auckland-New York JFK (Air New Zealand and Qantas) and San Francisco-Singapore (Singapore Airlines and United) are counted once for each airline.

Geography explains the pattern. Australia, New Zealand and Singapore sit far from North America and Europe, so their airlines have the most to gain from skipping a connecting stop. Qantas flies five of the 15 routes, from London-Perth to Perth-Rome, and Singapore Airlines flies four, all to the United States. The Gulf carriers, whose hubs normally sit in the middle of long journeys, appear three times, twice with Emirates and once with Qatar Airways on Doha-Los Angeles.

How the Longest Flights Have Grown Since 2000

OAG's historical schedule data shows the longest routes stretching steadily as aircraft improved. We recalculated every route in OAG's 2000, 2010 and 2025 top 10 lists with the same great-circle method used above, then added September 2026 and the planned Sydney-London route.

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Source: OAG, The World's Longest Routes Go 15% Further than 25 Years Ago, 14 May 2026 (route lists for 2000, 2010 and 2025); AirAdvisor great-circle calculation; Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise, accessed 25 September 2026. F = planned route launch, not yet operating.

In 2000 the longest route was South African Airways' Atlanta-Johannesburg at 13,582 km, and the 747-400 flew nine of the ten longest routes. Singapore Airlines then pushed the record to 15,345 km with Singapore-Newark, which was the world's longest route from 2004 until it was dropped in 2013, and again from its 2018 relaunch until 2020. In between, the title passed to Qantas' Sydney-Dallas/Fort Worth in 2014, Emirates' Dubai-Auckland in 2016 and Qatar Airways' Doha-Auckland in 2017. Singapore Airlines launched Singapore-JFK on 9 November 2020, and it has led ever since. The average of the top 10 rose 14.5% between 2000 and 2025, before the 2026 reroutings pulled it back to 14,385 km. Longer non-stop sectors burn more fuel per passenger just to carry their own fuel, a trade-off covered in our airline fuel consumption statistics.

Qantas Project Sunrise: Status in September 2026

Project Sunrise is Qantas' plan, announced in 2017, to fly non-stop from Australia's east coast to London and New York. As of 25 September 2026, Qantas says its first Airbus A350-1000ULR, named Vega, will be delivered in April 2027. Daily Sydney-London flights are due to start in October 2027, with tickets on sale from February 2027, and Sydney-New York will follow from mid-2028, on sale from August 2027. Qantas adds that both dates depend on regulatory approvals and aircraft certification.

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Source: Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise and Boeing 787 seat map pages, accessed 25 September 2026; Singapore Airlines, press releases of 30 May 2018 and 20 October 2020.

The Sunrise A350 trades seats for range and comfort. Qantas has fitted just 238 seats, which it calls the lowest seat density of any A350-1000 in service, with 98 seats (41%) in First, Business and Premium Economy and a Wellbeing Zone for stretching between cabins. Singapore Airlines went further on its A350-900ULR, which has only Business and Premium Economy seats. At 17,016 km (10,573 miles), Sydney-London would beat today's record by 1,667 km, and Sydney-New York at 16,013 km (9,950 miles) by 664 km. Qantas ordered 12 of the aircraft, and Airbus says an extra rear centre fuel tank adds 1,000 nautical miles of range; at 20,900 litres, that tank alone holds about 16.8 tonnes of jet fuel.

The test campaign is well advanced. The first A350-1000ULR, test aircraft MSN707, made its first flight on 2 June 2026. On 23 July it flew direct from Toulouse to Melbourne in about 20 hours, then returned with two Qantas pilots on board, covering 12,460 nm in 24 hours 24 minutes before landing in Toulouse on 28 July. Airbus says the aim was to show the aircraft can handle a 23-hour block time, enough to cover Qantas' intended flight time of 21 hours 40 minutes plus holding, diversion and taxi time.

Outlook

The record should stay with Singapore Airlines until October 2027, when Qantas plans to open Sydney-London. Before then, the shape of the top 10 depends mostly on Middle East airspace: Qantas has scheduled Perth to London via Singapore until at least 31 January 2027, and Qatar Airways' Auckland flights still stop in Australia. Seasonal routes can also shuffle the list in the northern winter: United's Houston-Sydney, at 13,834 km, was not flying in September but would rank ninth when it returns on 24 October 2026. Anyone tracking the busiest hubs behind these routes can compare them with our busiest airports statistics.

Long flight cancelled or rerouted at short notice?If your flight departed from the EU, or landed in the EU on an EU airline, a cancellation with less than 14 days' notice or an arrival 3+ hours late can mean up to 600 EUR under EU261. Flights from the UK are covered by UK261, up to 520 GBP.Check Your Flight

References and Sources

• OAG, The 10 Longest Flight Routes in the World (Summer 2026 ranking), updated April 2026
• OAG, April Aviation Infographics: World's longest non-stop flights, Summer 2026, 30 April 2026
• OAG, We've Come a Long Way: The World's Longest Routes Go 15% Further than 25 Years Ago, 14 May 2026
• Qantas, Airbus A350 Project Sunrise, accessed 25 September 2026
• Qantas, Boeing 787 and seat map, accessed 25 September 2026
• Qantas, Qantas International network update - March 2026, March 2026
• Head for Points, Qantas temporarily reroutes Perth to London flights again, 4 March 2026
• Airbus, World's longest-range aircraft, the Airbus A350-1000ULR takes to the skies, 2 June 2026
• Airbus, Extending the horizon: Inside the A350-1000ULR's longest development flight, 28 July 2026
• Singapore Airlines, Singapore Airlines To Launch World's Longest Commercial Flights, 30 May 2018
• Singapore Airlines, Singapore Airlines To Begin Non-Stop Services To New York's JFK International Airport, 20 October 2020
• Singapore Airlines, Airbus A350-900 fleet page, accessed 25 September 2026
• CAPA Centre for Aviation, Qatar Airways to commence Melbourne-Auckland service in Dec-2026, replacing Adelaide-Auckland, 24 July 2026
• Aerospace Global News, Qantas delays return of nonstop Perth-London flights until 2027, 21 August 2026
• Business Standard, Why Air India will stop non-stop Bengaluru, Mumbai-San Francisco flights, December 2025
• FlightAware, flight history and schedule records for the routes listed, 11-25 September 2026
• FlightMapper, flight schedule listings for the flight numbers analysed, accessed 25 September 2026
• OurAirports, airport coordinates dataset (airports.csv), accessed 25 September 2026

Methodology Note

We started from OAG's Summer 2026 top 10 by great-circle distance and added every other scheduled passenger route above 13,000 km that we could identify in public schedules, then checked each flight number against FlightAware records for 11-25 September 2026 and kept only routes with recorded non-stop passenger flights in at least one direction. Distances are great-circle values calculated with the Vincenty formula on the WGS-84 ellipsoid from OurAirports coordinates, rounded to the nearest kilometre and converted at 1 mile = 1.609344 km; they differ from OAG's published figures by up to about 25 km, which does not change any ranking. OAG's own top-10 averages (12,667 km in 2000, 13,464 km in 2010 and 14,504 km in 2025) differ slightly from our recalculated 12,679 km, 13,488 km and 14,513 km for the same reason; both give 14.5% growth from 2000 to 2025. Block times are scheduled gate-to-gate times for flights operating in the week of 25 September 2026 and include taxi time, so they differ from airborne time. Aircraft counts treat Auckland-New York JFK (Air New Zealand and Qantas) and San Francisco-Singapore (Singapore Airlines and United) as two operations each and use the type flown on most recorded flights. The 2027F point is Qantas' planned Sydney-London launch, not an operating route, and Project Sunrise dates are Qantas' own and subject to certification. Fuel mass assumes a Jet A-1 density of 0.804 kg per litre. Flight tracking data can miss individual flights, so a route marked as not operating means no non-stop flights appeared in the 14-day window checked.

Author:

Amy Lancelotte

Job/Position: Senior Writer & Content Strategist

Amy Lancelotte is a Senior Content Writer and editorial contributor at AirAdvisor with over seven years of experience producing research-based articles for international audiences. Her work focuses on travel, aviation, and air passenger rights, with an emphasis on factual accuracy, verified data, and clear, reader-first explanations.

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