IT was a night and a day – and another night and yet another day – to remember, and Smithy and Lindbergh would have been so impressed.
IT was a night and a day – and another night and yet another day – to remember, and Smithy and Lindbergh would have been so impressed.
WA Business News was aboard last month to get a taste of the future of flying when Boeing flew its 777-200LR aircraft from Hong Kong to London eastbound – a distance of 22,520 kilometres in 22 hours 42 minutes.
Qantas is in the final stages of making a decision to buy the 777-200LR or the A340-500 from Airbus that can fly from London-Sydney non-stop with a commercial payload, or Perth to London non-stop with a full payload.
Airlines such as Qantas, Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada and Emirates want to offer passengers more non-stop options to bypass sometimes congested hubs such as Tokyo, where passengers endure a typical two-hour transit stop.
Singapore already operates two 18-hour non-stop flights, from Singapore to Los Angeles and Singapore to New York, while last month Emirates and Air Canada ordered the 777-200LR to open up new routes such as Dubai to Houston or Vancouver to Sydney.
Some question ultra-long flights but the reality is that, 15 years ago, travellers were shaking their heads about 14-hour flights with the introduction of the 747-400. Today it’s commonplace.
The record-breaking 22 hour 42 minute flight was far from an ordeal.
Helping the 35 passengers – made up of flight and technical crew, Boeing executives and just a handful of media – to create history was a fuel load of 164 tonnes and in our sights were two Qantas records.
Qantas set a distance record in 1989 of 17,982km when its first Rolls-Royce powered 747-400 flew non-stop from London to Sydney on its delivery flight.
That flight had only 18 passengers and crew, no galley equipment, used special high-density fuel and the 747 was towed to the runway to save fuel.
It took 20 hours and nine minutes and the aircraft used up most of its 183.5 tonnes of fuel.
For that flight Qantas chose a ‘great circle’ route that took the 747 over Frankfurt, Belgrade, Turkey, Muscat, Sri Lanka, and the Cocos Islands before crossing the Western Australian coast near Carnarvon. Over WA the 747-400 reached its final cruising altitude of 45,000 feet.
The other record the 777-200LR was after was ‘the order of the double sunrise’, which wartime passengers achieved on the 27- to 33-hour non-stop flight from Koggala Lake in southern Ceylon to Perth in a twin-engine Catalina flying boat.
Those Catalinas were stripped down and had no guns or electric hot plates for making coffee, and they could only carry three passengers—typically military staff.
No such austere flying conditions for us.
Boeing had fitted out its 777-200LR demonstrator with a luxury interior, complete with a reception area for presentations and a large business class seating zone.
A couple of dozen economy seats and some test equipment completed the fit-out. It was like our personal VIP jet.
Boeing had also provided a corporate flight attendant, Maureen Walker of Walker Aviation in Seattle, who is more accustomed to looking after the every whim of Microsoft’s owners and their fleet of corporate jets.
Helping her, two Boeing executives donned black ties to supply a first-class service. But before the wine would flow, there was the small challenge of getting airborne.
Every effort was made to conserve fuel and the aircraft was specially washed down to rid it of 150kg of dirt. Passengers were restricted to just 18kg of baggage, including laptops and cameras, a situation that provided most of us with serious challenges – and revelations of how achievable travelling light actually is.
The 777-200LR was pushed back from the stand at the CX Engineering base at the southern end of HK International airport at 10.08pm and towed to the end of the short taxiway to save fuel.
At 10.22pm, the engines were started and we were under way four minutes later.
Pilot in command, Captain Suzanna Darcy-Hennemann, pushed the throttles all the way forward at 10.30pm and within 40 seconds we were airborne to rousing cheers.
Interestingly, the 777-200LR took off at 711,000lbs, well under its maximum take-off weight of 766,000lbs.
The bright lights of Hong Kong quickly slipped away.
It turns out that setting a world record is not as simple as just flying from one place to another.
On board was Arthur Greenfield from the National Aeronautic Association to certify that Boeing followed the complex rules to the letter.
All passengers and baggage had to be weighed and in fact, every item on board had been weighed. The NAA has plenty of experience in such things having monitored the Wright Brothers’ distance-record flight in 1905 – and every record flight since.
Under the NAA rules, Boeing selected three waypoints three hours before takeoff.
Setting a distance record is like a yacht race, with the aircraft having to fly over rather than around a marker but what it does to get to that mark is up to the crew. Like a smart yachting skipper the 777 pilots could fly out of the way to pick up stronger tailwinds.
Our first marker was on the international dateline north of Midway Island. The second was over Los Angeles International Airport and the third over New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Just 18 minutes after leaving Hong Kong, the 777-200LR reached its initial cruising altitude of 29,000ft and Captain Darcy-Hennemann eased right back on the throttles. And what a difference to the fuel burn.
At take-off, the two GE-90-110B engines consumed 50,000lbs of fuel per hour but once cruise was reached and the throttles eased back they were quite happy with just 15,000lbs and, later in the flight that would drop to just 9,000lbs an hour.
That’s a miserly 2.6 litres per 100km per passenger for a typical load.
The 777-200LR tracked north-east over Taipei and the southern island of Japan before turning due east to the mid-Pacific. About one hour before the aircraft reached the international dateline, and its first waypoint, passengers witnessed their first sunrise.
After the first waypoint the pilots turned the 777 north-east to find a promised jet stream that would give us a kick.
And kick it did.
A 244km/h tailwind had us at 1,137km/h and speeding towards Los Angeles. As the 777 approached the city of freeways, passengers had cameras clicking to record the sunset.
Then it was happy hour.
As we approached the halfway point, out came special Silverlake sparkling wine from Washington state, which was consumed enthusiastically by the guests as we sped over Los Angeles.
It took just 15 seconds to clear Los Angeles; oh to clear LA customs in that time.
Words of encouragement were transmitted from other aircraft, although some aircraft traffic controllers were confused as to why we were flying the long way from Hong Kong to London.
Air traffic controllers were not the only ones confused.
The 777’s in-flight airshow program kept showing the shortest course to London as our intended flight path and wasn’t ‘happy’ until we were much closer to London.
Our magic carpet was soon over Denver to pick up more fair winds.
It then turned east towards New York, which slipped under us at about 3am local time.
Newfoundland was next and as the lights passed below, the first hint of our second sunrise had BBC and CNN cameras in the cockpit to record the historic event.
As the ‘order of the double sunrise’ record fell, Captain Rod Scarr announced to those in the cockpit that Qantas’ long-standing distance record had also just fallen.
Nobody was asleep – we were far too excited to sleep.
No such problem with the aircraft’s GE engines.
They performed flawlessly and there was plenty of juice left in the tanks.
In fact, when the 777-200LR touched down in London a few hours later, it had flown 22,520km, although Boeing could only claim 21,601km, which was the shortest distance between the waypoints.
Incredibly, when the engines where shut down, there was still 18,700lbs of fuel left – almost enough for another two hours of flying.
But perhaps the most amazing thing of the entire flight was that the engines required no oil top up for the flight home to Seattle.
Charles Lindbergh and Sir Charles Kingsford Smith would have been so impressed.
Not with the back slapping, the eager photo opportunities of the flight crew or the flowing champagne, but instead with the Boeing 777-200LR, which had just conquered the three greatest challenges in commercial aviation – non-stop air travel over the continental US, Atlantic and the Pacific – in one flight.
Lindbergh was the first to conquer the Atlantic solo in May 1927, taking 33 hours, while Kingsford Smith and his three crew took 10 days with three stops to cross the Pacific in June 1928.
For commercial aviation, it was not until 1953, with the four-engine DC-7, that commercial aircraft could cross the US non-stop in both directions. Two years later, a more powerful version of the Douglas aircraft – the DC-7C – enabled airlines to cross the Atlantic non-stop in both directions.
But the Pacific was not conquered non-stop until Pan American introduced the 747SP in the late 1970s.
For decades, airlines have urged aircraft and engine makers to do their utmost to deliver them ‘magic carpets’ to fly further more economically.
But for airlines, it is also a battle between the marketing and finance departments over the critical question: Will passengers pay for the convenience of non-stop travel?
So far the answer is a resounding yes.
Who would accept a Honolulu stop on a Los Angeles-Sydney flight or an extra stop in Bahrain on a Perth-Singapore-London flight?
Some travellers can even remember when Sydney to Perth required a stop in Adelaide and even the occasional stop in Kalgoorlie.
If Qantas buys the 777-200LR it will almost certainly configure the aircraft for premium classes – first and business – and no economy.
