By Kyunghee Park
Bloomberg News - Oct 22, 2013
The end of the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight, a 19-hour slog between Singapore and New
York, is bad news for Chia Teck Fatt.
The 9,000-nautical mile journey from Singapore to Newark,
New Jersey, helped him avoid congestion at New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport. Passengers will instead fly to
JFK via Frankfurt, adding five hours. Singapore Airlines Ltd. (SIA)
stops the services with its all-business class four-engine
Airbus SAS A340-500 next month, after ending the second-longest
flight from Los Angeles to the island city yesterday.
“It could take over an hour just to get through customs at
JFK,” said Chia, after checking-in at the business-class lounge
at Singapore’s Changi Airport. “I’m looking for another way to
travel to New York so I can avoid flying into JFK,” said Chia,
dressed in casual pants, t-shirt, a jacket and loafers.
With oil prices tripling in the last decade, the carrier
struggled to ferry executives on the 100-seat flights profitably
for the past nine years, a sign that the airline industry is
once again putting profitability ahead of glamor. The iconic
transatlantic flights with the supersonic Concorde were scrapped
a decade ago. The shrinking of Wall Street firms and travel
cutbacks after the global financial crisis have made it
difficult for airlines to lure top-dollar clients.
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