EWR-DEL: A Long Ride

We're looking forward to a lot of flying next week. We're due to take off at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday to fly SEA-EWR (Newark). Once we've arrived in EWR (Newark NJ), we'll meet up in a lounge for a cozy five-hour layover with Kathy's brother Tom, his wife Ellyn, and their daughter Haley, who are all flying in from Colorado.

We'll then settle in to our BusinessFirst seats on CO82 (UA82), a Boeing 777-200ER (extended range) to fly EWR-DEL.

That's one of the longer current non-stop commercial flights. Once you slide past the Singapore Airlines flight EWR-SIN, which tops all others at 9535 miles and nearly 19 hours, most of the other flights bunch together at or around 16-17 hours and within 500 miles of 8000 on either side. One listing of such flights may be seen here. On another list in which the distances are measured in nautical miles, EWR-DEL is number 35.

We flew another of these marathon flights with Tom and Ellyn four years ago from New York to Johannesburg. We were squeezed into economy seats on that flight, and this will be a big improvement.

CO estimates our flight time to be 14 hr 13 minutes, and the distance to be 7,323 miles, both well below the list. It all literally depends on which way the wind is blowing and a number of other factors, but it'll be another new destination for us.

Adding in the 5 hr 14 minute flight of 2,401 miles SEA-EWR, CO estimates we'll be in the air for a total of 24 hr 50 minutes from start to finish and will have flown 9724 miles, a good start to our flying year.