In the next month, Singapore Airlines is going open up a NY City to Singapore route....non-stop. Hours involved? The experts say roughly 19 hours of airtime.
I sat and pondered upon this. You arrive at the airport....spend roughly three hours doing the bag-drag, ticket-counter, security check-out, and then sip through two beers while waiting for your boarding. Then you take off and spend nineteen hours in the air. Then you land....go through immigration, another bag-drag, ride the taxi over to the Singapore hotel, and sit down. Total hours? You can figure 26 hours minimum.
So how do you waste nineteen hours in the air? The longest flight I've ever taken in my life was Dubai to Sydney, with around 16.5 hours in the air. I wasted four hours at the very beginning watching two movies and munching through a fairly decent dinner. Then I sat at the bar (yes, they had an actual bar in the cabin) and sipped through two cocktails and a wine. Then I slept for six hours. I woke up....added up the hours, and realized that I still five more hours to go. So I went back, reviewed my 200 movies on the menu and found something to watch.
The problem with nineteen hours on your hand....is that you can only sleep about one-third of that. Boredom? You tend to get maxed out. Toss in the fact that sixty-percent of the passengers are in some cramped-up seating arrangement and begging for relief after ten hours.
Drinking your way through the nineteen hours? I can see a dozen-odd folks on each flight who will finish off six to eight wines, maybe a similar number of cocktails, and try to just blitz themselves to sleep. Course, you might wake up five hours in the flight, with some flight emergency going on, and suddenly realize you are too drunk to really care.
Will they even haven enough people to fly each day into Singapore? That's another question I'd be interested about.
Maybe this is a trend, but I'm kinda wondering how many people get all peppy and excited about nineteen hours in the air.....just one-way.
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