The longest scheduled flight in the world from Singapore to Newark will be reduced below daily frequency from mid February by Singapore Airlines because of the global financial crisis.
Reports in Singapore say that four of the daily non-stops the carrier currently flies between Changi Airport and Los Angeles as well as Newark (for Manhattan) will be culled between 17 February and 25 March, making the total number of recently announced cutbacks by the carrier 218 flights, a figure almost certain to rise further. It isn’t clear if each city will lose two flights, or if Los Angeles will take most of the reductions.
Don’t be surprised to see other international carriers make very large schedule reductions in the coming weeks for the same reasons.
The airports are getting emptier and the corporate travel accounts are shrinking, especially those serving the finance and banking houses that used to generate prodigious amounts of repeat travel on the major long haul routes in the northern hemisphere.
Cutting daily services to only five times weekly may become a very common shorter term response to the situation.
There is a popular myth that the Singapore-Newark flights in what has recently become a 98 seat all business class configuration for the Airbus A340-500 airliner that flies it were never profitable. But this is Singapore Airlines, and sources who know its operations in considerable detail always emphasised that the carrier has a very low tolerance for loss making services, and would never have kept the flights going since they began in 2004 if the dollars didn’t make sense.
The incredibly long flights that depending on the conditions sometimes fly close to the north pole could last anywhere between just under 18 hours to almost 19 hours 30 minutes. The great circle distance between the two airports is 15,345 kilometres, and depending on the seasonal peculiarities of flirting with the boundary of darkness and light at high latitudes, could involve three sunrises between Newark and Singapore, or only one.
Or hours of flying in a sky full of sunset colours, or over a dazzling white polar vastness where you needed sunglasses even in mid winter when a full moon was hanging low on the Arctic horizon.
But so much for ‘the romance of flight’, one of Singapore Airlines’ current slogans. The polar express between the financial capitals of America and SE Asia is not going to be daily again for quite some time, and if the mayhem in the banking system worsens, could even become history.
One Comment
My wife and I travelled the Singapore to Newark flight last April (08), not long before the aircraft were coverted to all business class (we flew executive economy). We enjoyed the trip and vowed that we would use the same service in 2010, but Singapore Air put stop to that idea. I cannot understand how the airline thinks it’s more economical to cram us onto a 747 and make a stop along the way, the extra fuel use should prove that. We paid AU2,500ea to travel Perth to New York and LA to Perth, both via Singapore. The executive economy section was near capacity both directions, but business was less than half full. I think the Singapore Air bean counters, counted the wrong sections of the aircraft, when they decided to go all business.