Let's write about ultra-long-haul air travel. Back in October last year I went to Hong Kong. My original plan was to spend a day sitting around the airport, photographing the big planes that land there, but I was thwarted by an outbreak of democracy. Hong Kong Airport's official spotting area was closed, and although Lantau Island has lots of great views I kept putting it off until it was time to go home.
Hong Kong has always been an appealing destination for planespotters. In the days of Kai Tak it was relatively easy to take close-up photos of 747s and DC-10s as they came in to land because the flight path went directly over Kowloon. Nowadays Kai Tak is gone, and aeroplanes land at Lantau Island to the west, but Hong Kong is still a great location if you want to photograph relatively rare aircraft such as the Airbus A340 and any Boeing 747 that isn't flown by British Airways or Lufthansa.
As of this writing Hong Kong's protests have quietened down, so perhaps I might go again in the near future. After all, what could possibly stop me? The chances of a global pandemic bringing air travel to a standstill are tiny, and Hong Kong's protests are unlikely to flare up again.
But imagine if there was a global pandemic. It would eliminate half of the airliners I'm about to write about, because if the A380 was economically marginal when the world was happy and healthy it would be utterly doomed in the face of a global downturn. Still, at least the Boeing 747 will remain in service. British Airways couldn't possibly eliminate its 747 fleet overnight. Not a chance.
Anyway, 2020 is sure to be an exceptional year for air travel.
Hengsha, from the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Technically not Hong Kong, but come on, it's Hong Kong.
An exceptional year. I wrote the bulk of this blog post in mid-2019, reworked it at the end of the year, and added a bit here and there mid-way through 2020. On the positive side I got to go to Hong Kong. In the narrow gap between the protests and the plague, I got to see Hong Kong with my own eyes, and spend money in Hong Kong. A mixture of local shops, McDonald's, the MTR, and a landlord benefited from my trip, and I like to think that I did no harm.
I didn't see the Hong Kong of legend - that's gone - but I did see a newer Hong Kong. Hong Kong in the act of transformation. Whatever happens, Hong Kong will always have a killer location on its side. No matter how far Shenzhen surpasses Hong Kong economically it will never have a huge mountain just off the coast, or at least it won't unless China dynamites Hong Kong into powder, but let's not go there.
But what about ultra-long-haul air travel, eh? In the past there were lots of different airliners - lots of different types - but nowadays the market has settled on big twinjets that all look the same from a distance. The only major exceptions are the four-engined A340, 747, and A380, but they won't be around for many more years.
We live in an unromantic age. We've measured the distance to the nearest stars, but they're too far away for us to reach. They are dying, just as our own sun is dying. The human soul is an illusion born of our inability to comprehend that the universe was not made for us. Heaven? There isn't one. It's all just particles and waves, collapsing into an undifferentiated soup of quantum noise that will obliterate all record of our passing. There's nothing waiting for us on the other side. We're just animals with complex brains.
Ultra-long-haul travellers in the first half of the twentieth century had to contend with unreliable piston engines and interception by the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force, but if they reached their destination they became members of an exclusive club. They had been half-way around the world at a time when most people spent their whole lives in one village, without ever going further than the nearest market town.
But air travel has changed immensely in the last hundred years. The first non-stop transatlantic flight happened in June 1919; it took John Alcock and Arthur Brown sixteen hours to travel the 1,900 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland, during which they almost crashed into the sea twice. They had to fly blind through freezing clouds. Their only sustenance was coffee, beer, and sandwiches, and at one point Brown had to climb onto the wing in order to hack ice from the engines. When they reached Clifden in County Galway they crashed into a bog because there was no air traffic control in 1919.
A hundred years later I covered a much greater distance in only twelve hours, and I didn't have to pack any food because British Airways still serves meals on long-haul flights. The greatest danger I faced was deep vein thrombosis; my greatest enemy was boredom; my greatest challenge was timing the toilet breaks so that I didn't upset the other passengers. I monitored my progress with GPS and watched a couple of films on my tablet in between fitful bouts of sleep. Someone on the ground probably followed my aircraft with a flight-tracking website, perhaps planning a trip of their own. Not once did it strike me that I might not arrive.
I grew up in a small village in the English countryside. If I had been born a hundred years earlier my chances of visiting the Far East would have been very slim. I might have joined the Royal Navy, or alternatively the Army, in the hope that I would be sent to one of the British Empire's distant garrisons. The Royal Air Force wouldn't have been interested in a working-class farmboy from Wiltshire, unless perhaps I was handy with a tractor. I would never have been allowed to fly a plane, but perhaps I could have been a mechanic.
However times have changed. The only thing I needed to visit Hong Kong in 2019 was a bunch of credit cards and some deft timing with my online bank account and some leave allowance from work. There were no other obstacles. I booked everything by computer from the comfort of my own home. Before my journey I scouted out Kowloon with Google Street View, and after I landed I used a GPS app on my mobile phone to navigate to the hotel, using technology that would have been a dream in the days of H G Wells.
Did H G Wells ever visit Hong Kong? If he did, the internet doesn't say. A hundred years ago H G Wells and his science fiction chums believed that human progress was inevitable, and that it would only stop with our ascent to the stars or the total destruction of humanity in nuclear fire.
In the event we reached the moon, but no further than that. Our nuclear arsenals remain under lock and key, but on a spiritual level the twentieth century was apocalyptic. Charles Darwin pointed out in convincing fashion that we are just animals. The physicists obliterated the idea of eternity. The artists and philosophers came up with nothing to match the discovery that some metals could be made to explode with the force of a small sun. The nuclear fire that washed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a postmodern invention, not an alternative narrative, it actually happened.
We are still adapting to the horrific realisation that death is the eternal cessation of consciousness. The grim truth has not yet dawned on all of humanity, but truth is immortal and unstoppable. How will we cope? I suspect with a retreat into fantasy, into numbness, into narcotic oblivion.
In the current century the pace of change is still rapid, but in terms of the hard stuff - rockets, jet engines, cars and so forth - we have moved beyond the exciting age of discovery into an autumnal period of refinement. A hundred years from now air travel will almost certainly be more efficient than it is today, but I doubt it will be faster.
Solar-powered drones will allow us to travel the globe virtually, but people will still want to take photographs of themselves standing in front of the actual Grand Canal. The human population will expand and the cost of travel will go down, and perhaps many years from now foreigners will come here and take photographs of us for other foreigners back home, and then we will be the foreigners, but let's talk about ultra-long-haul air travel.
Let's talk about ultra-long-haul air travel. Let's do this. Ultra-long-haul air travel. That's the title of this blog post. Let's concentrate on ultra-long-haul air travel from now on. The future of human society can look after itself. I begin. Ultra-long-haul air travel. Until the 1980s airliners flying from Europe to the Far East had to stop for fuel, but nowadays some aeroplanes can make the trip in one go. There are currently five such airliners flying the skies today, but only one of them is an unqualified success. Of the other four, two are on their way out of service, one is on the verge of a precipitous decline, and the remaining aircraft is used more frequently on shorter routes.
Which one is the unqualified success? Which of the others is mostly a success, but doomed by advances in technology? Read on, dear reader, and in just a few short minutes you will start to skip whole paragraphs and then get bored and read something else, if you haven't already. I have suffered a twelve-hour flight from London to Hong Kong and I want you to suffer as well.
I define an ultra-long-haul airliner as having a range of 7,000 nautical miles or more, or roughly 8,000 regular miles. Aircraft operators use nautical miles for navigational purposes but I'll use regular miles as often as possible because nautical miles are weird. Bear in mind that ultra-long-haul airliners are designed to have more range than strictly necessary in case of an emergency, so ultra-long-haul routes start at 6,000 miles. Modern airliners all fly at roughly the same speed, so that's about twelve hours in the air.
London to New York is 3,500 miles, a typical long-haul distance, but not ultra-long-haul. London to Hong Kong is 6,000 miles, which is ultra-long-haul, and London to Perth on Australia's west coast is 9,000 miles, which sits on the dividing line between ultra-long-haul and publicity stunt. As of 2019 the longest non-stop airline flight is from Newark to Singapore, a distance of 9,500 miles. Qantas has mooted a London to Sydney flight, which would be 10,000 miles, but it's not due to begin until next year and I imagine its existence depends on the state of the global economy.
The first generation of jetliners had ranges of 3-4,000 miles, which wasn't enough to comfortably fly from Paris or London to New York non-stop. Flying from the United States to Europe was slightly easier because pilots could hitch a ride on the eastbound jet stream, but for the most part early jetliners had to land at Gander in Newfoundland or Shannon in Ireland to take on fuel before heading on to their destination.
Early jetliners were also small by modern standards, so when jet travel became affordable in the 1960s and 1970s manufacturers stretched their existing designs to pack in more passengers. They also developed a new generation of "widebody" airliners such as the Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed L-1011, which had ranges of 4-5,000 miles. Modern widebodies extend that by 1,000 miles, but that's still not enough, and so until the late 1980s ultra-long-haul travel still involved a stopover, generally in the Middle or Far East.
A Boeing 747-400, courtesy byeangel (CC 2.0).
The very first ultra-long-haul airliner was the Boeing 747, which was introduced in 1969, although it wasn't until the late 1970s that the 747 actually flew ultra-long-haul routes. The original 747-100 prioritised passenger load over range, with a capacity of 360-400 passengers versus 270 for the Douglas DC10. The 747 brought transatlantic travel within the financial reach of more people than before, but the aircraft's great weight meant that it had no more range than competing widebodies.
However the Middle Eastern markets wanted a long-range jumbo, so in the mid-1970s Boeing introduced the 747SP, which carried more fuel than the standard 747 but was shorter and thus lighter. Unfortunately its launch coincided with a downturn in the global economy, and furthermore there was less demand for a long-range-small-capacity 747 than Boeing expected, so Boeing only sold 45 of them. The inaugural customer was Iran Air, who bought four 747SPs and might have bought more, but events in 1979 caused US-Iranian relations to cool somewhat.
Iran's lack of access to replacement aircraft meant that its 747SPs remained in service for a long time, the last being retired in 2016. Only ten are still flying, although none of them are owned by airlines. NASA flies two, a Las Vegas casino owns another two, one is owned by an Ohio-based religious organisation, the rest are either government transports or flying testbeds. If you want to fly on a 747SP today your options are limited.
Ultimately the 747SP was a commercial disappointment. Later versions of the Boeing 747-200 approached ultra-long-haul range, but the first truly successful ultra-long-haul airliner was the Boeing 747-400, which was launched in 1989. It had wingtip extensions and an extra fuel tank, and it was so popular that within two years Boeing discontinued all of the other 747s. As of 2019 it is by far the most common 747 still in passenger service.
The 747-400 was capable of flying even greater distances if it was lightly loaded. In 1989 Qantas used a 747-400 to make the very first non-stop flight from England to Australia, taking off from Heathrow and landing in Sydney twenty hours later. At the time it was a record-setting one-off - the aircraft used special jet fuel and only carried sixteen passengers - but as mentioned earlier Qantas is now planning to launch a non-stop London-Sydney flight. At that point Australia will be flooded with even more tourists than it is today. The people of Sydney will be so happy.
Once the 10,000-mile barrier is broken it'll be game over for ultra-long-haul flight records. The Earth's circumference is only 24,000 miles, so an airliner with a range of 12,000 miles could theoretically reach any point on the planet. In practice the geography of the Earth's land masses is such that unless the elusive Hanoi-La Paz route becomes economically viable there's very little chance that an airline will ever offer a regularly-scheduled 12,000-mile flight.
Instead airlines of the future will compete to bring the cost of long-haul down, or make the journey less environmentally damaging, or both. Average journey times for long-haul flights are generally much the same today as they were thirty years ago. The relative failure of the supersonic Concorde and the high-speed Convair 880/990 demonstrated that all but the most demanding passengers are willing to tolerate longer flight times if it means getting to their destination with cash to spare.
Big airliners aren't the only aeroplanes that can travel long distances. A handful of small business jets can fly ultra-long-haul, notably the Gulfstream G650ER, which has a range of around 8,500 miles. Bombardier is currently developing a pair of long-range bizjets, the Global 7500 and Global 8000, but neither aircraft has entered service yet.
A Quantas Boeing 747-400, courtesy Aero Icarus (CC 2.0)
So, as of 2019 which airliners fly ultra-long-haul? As mentioned there's the Boeing 747, a large, four-engined, long-range jet with a passenger capacity of around 500 people, give or take a hundred either way depending on the interior configuration. The 747 was designed in the late 1960s as a large passenger jet that could also be used as a freighter, because Boeing was worried that supersonic aircraft would take over most of the passenger market. The 747 has a distinctive design, with a short top deck that gives the plane a hump. The nosecone of the freighter version is designed to swing open, so Boeing put the cockpit in the top deck instead of the nose.
The most common passenger version of the 747 is the 747-400, which was launched in the late 1980s and has a longer top deck than its predecessors. People smile when they see a 747 because the proportions are pleasing to the eye, but as a passenger experience the interior apparently isn't all that great. I haven't been on one, but I note that British Airways' 747's don't have in-seat power in the economy section. The latest version of the 747, the 747-8, was launched in the early 2010s, but the passenger version wasn't very popular. The freighter version has outsold it almost two-to-one and Boeing is apparently on the verge of closing the production line. Nonetheless the 747 will probably remain flying well into the 2020s.
A Cathay Pacific Boeing 747-8 freighter. Note the serrated engine exhausts. That's the easiest way to identify the 747-8. Courtesy Windmemories (CC 4.0).
Why is the 747 on the way out? In the past, if you wanted to transport a lot of people over a long distance the only suitable airliners had three or four engines. Twinjets didn't have the power or range to do the job, and long-range aviation rules forbade twinjets from crossing large bodies of water. They weren't allowed to travel more than an hour from an diversionary airport in case one of the engines failed and the pilot had to land in a hurry.
Nowadays engine technology and materials design is such that twin-engined jets can travel almost as far as their three-and-four-engined ancestors, without having to carry the extra weight of more engines and the associated plumbing. In the 1980s a new generation of reliable, high-bypass turbofans prompted the international civil aviation authorities to relax the rules on long-range twin-engined flight, and from that point on trijets and quadjets started to die off.
A Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, courtesy Windmemories (CC 4.0).
A Douglas DC-10, courtesy Amayagan (CC 1.0).
There's another reason for the 747's decline. The 747's great size is awkward for airlines, who generally need to fill their airliners to capacity in order to make a profit. Although long-haul flight is more popular than ever before it's still much less popular than short-haul and mid-range routes, and airlines find it easier to fill several smaller airliners than a single very large one.
I have to admit that the finer details of airline profit margins are beyond me. Along with Battle of Britain fuel octane ratings and the desirability of big-gun battleships in a littoral context the airline business is the kind of thing that makes internet nerds argue amongst themselves, but in general the big four-engined jumbos of the past are dying out and will probably never return. The 747 is in the twilight of its years, but you shouldn't feel sad because it had a terrific run and was a big success for Boeing.
An Air India Boeing 777, courtesy Aero Icarus (CC A-SA 2 G).
The 777 is smaller and lighter than the 747-400, but some models have roughly the same range. At the same time it's efficient enough to be used on high-capacity short-to-mid-haul flights - the same kind of market that the early versions of the 747 were built to service. British Airways flies 777s from London to Hong Kong, but it also uses the same aircraft on two-hour flights from Heathrow to Madrid, presumably packed with masses of drunk people in both directions. The 777 is very popular and its safety record is exceptional. To date there have been only two major accidents, both in 2014, and they were extremely unusual - an unexplained disappearance and a shoot-down respectively.
It's hard to write about the Boeing 777 because what is there to say? The major criticism levelled at it is that it's bland, which is a lot better than being infamous. The quadjets and trijets are gone; t-tails are gone; rear-mounted engines and airstairs are gone; supersonic airliners are gone; those quirky Russian airliners with glass noses are gone; propfans never took off; etc. They were all replaced with twin-engined wing-mounted low-tailed subsonic aircraft that look the same.
A Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The serrated engine exhausts are a Boeing thing - they're designed to reduce engine noise by disrupting the airflow. Courtesy Alex Wilson - CC 2.0.
I still think of the 777 as a new design, but it's now almost thirty years old. The 777 is likely to remain in production for many years but, in turn, it is slowly being replaced by an even newer generation of long-haul twinjets made of advanced materials. Boeing's most recent long-haul jet is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which entered service in the early 2010s. It carries around 300 passengers over a distance of roughly 8,000 miles, but as with the 777 it's efficient enough to be used on short-haul routes as well. In fact the most popular 787 routes are short domestic flights in the Far East, and perhaps because of this I find it hard to think of the 787 as an ultra-long-haul airliner. It has only been in service for a few years and despite some early worries about battery fires it has had a good record and has sold well.
At this point I'm going to digress a bit. Most of the English-speaking internet is American. All of the major websites are American and most English-speaking people on the internet are American, so naturally the internet loves Boeing. Boeing isn't just an American company; Boeing is America, just as Walmart is America, just as Ford and Standard Oil were once America.
This is unfortunate for the other major manufacturer of full-sized jet airliners. Airbus was founded in the mid-sixties by a group of British, French, and German aircraft manufacturers, although Britain's commitment to the project has waned and waxed since then. The first Airbus was the Airbus A300, a mid-sized twin-engined widebody designed to carry a lot of people over relatively short distances. It was launched in the early 1970s, but sales were slow for several years. Eventually it caught on and by the 1980s it was a big sales success, replacing the ageing four-engined Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. It was the perfect airliner for package tours, with more capacity than dedicated short-haul aircraft and none of the extra fuss of the four-engined medium-haul heavies.
Airbus competes in the same market as Boeing but its aircraft tend to be aimed at slightly different niches. They're usually slightly larger than the direct Boeing equivalent, initially with more modern avionics, although nowadays the two companies have technological parity. Boeing and Airbus have managed to coexist for the last thirty years, but as far as the internet is concerned Airbus is the enemy. A tacky Eurotrash usurper. In the mind of the internet Boeing makes a range of quality aircraft whereas Airbus makes fussy European plastic rubbish. Airbus airliners have electronic fly-by-wire controls because European pilots are wristcels*. Boeing's marketing department fights fair but Airbus is kept afloat by EU subsidies. Airbus affects an air of class but it is run by awful French people who eat baby birds. That is the view of the internet.
* For future reference, a "wristcel" is a person who believes that narrow wrists are the reason for their lack of success with the opposite sex.
I'm British, so I don't have a dog in the fight. I'm neutral. I dislike Boeing because they stole the secrets of our Hawker Siddeley Trident, and also because they had the temerity to compete with the De Havilland Comet, and I dislike Airbus because they're French. Technically Airbus is a European consortium, but they're French really. As soon as the French touch something it becomes French, because their fingertips are coated with bacteria. Boeing and the French conspired to destroy the British aviation industry and as far as I'm concerned they're both equally bad. The Americans with their money and the French with their lies and poor personal hygiene.
The rational part of my brain says that British airliners were underpowered, overpriced, oddly-sized, awkwardly-designed, and hobbled by politics and a small domestic market. The rational part of my brain says that the Comet was too small to do its job effectively, that the money we sank into Concorde was wasted, that the Trident needed a booster engine in the tail to take off from some airports thus making it the world's only four-engined trijet, that the VC10 was too expensive for its marginal superiority over the Boeing 707, that our faith in central planning and our lack of ambition and basic business competence was our own fault, that the aviation industries of Europe and the United States also suffered market failures but bounced back, whereas we gave up, and if Britain was so superior how come we lost, hmm?
The rational part of my brain says that Dassault only managed to sell eleven Mercures and yet Airbus still exists, and that Bombardier and Embraer continue to sell regional jets while the BAe-146 and BAC 1-11 are long-gone.
The rational part of my brain is prone to distressing outbursts. I try not to listen to it and I have never allowed it to take control of my body. I can keep it in check, but I don't want to shut it up entirely because one day its advice might be useful.
An Airbus A340, courtesy Aero Icarus (CC 2.0).
I was talking about long-haul airliners. The Airbus A340 is a four-engined jet that was introduced in the early 1990s. It has a relatively modest capacity of around 300 passengers, give or take fifty or so, and was purpose-built for long-haul flight. In the early 2000s Virgin Atlantic painted "4 engines 4 long haul" on their A340s, but unfortunately for Airbus the A340 entered the market just as aviation regulations on twin-engined flight were relaxed, and as a result the A340 was never very popular.
For a while in the 2000s the longest regularly-scheduled non-stop airline flight was flown by an A340, between Singapore and New Jersey, but even when four-engined jets made sense the A340 had a niche market. It was designed in parallel with the shorter-ranged A330 and used the same wing and fuselage, so presumably it didn't cost Airbus a fortune to develop, but even so it's generally regarded as a victim of poor timing. Despite having a two-year head start on the Boeing 777 Airbus only sold 377 A340s versus 1,500 777s. There just wasn't much demand for an airliner that could transport a small number of people over a very long distance.
An Airbus A350, courtesy MNXANL (CC 4.0).
The A340 was replaced in the early 2010s by the Airbus A350, a twinjet that carries roughly 350 passengers over an even longer distance than the A340, although in practice the A350 is generally flown on standard transatlantic-type flights. The A350 is roughly analogous to the Boeing 787 but slightly larger and not as popular. My hunch is that the design is less suitable for short-haul/high-capacity flights, but the two aircraft are still winning orders so we won't know who won for a decade or so.
The A350's main distinguishing feature is its black-painted cockpit window frames. Apparently it's a cost-saving measure for when the cockpit glass has to be replaced - the airline doesn't have to paint the frame to match the rest of the aircraft, it can just drop in the new cockpit glass and that's it, job done.
An Airbus A380.
That brings us to the final ultra-long-haul airliner and the most controversial of the lot. The Airbus A380 is a very large four-engined airliner that entered service in the mid-2000s. It carries 600 people, give or take fifty or so, over a distance of up to 9,000 miles. That's a lot of people. In some respects it's the opposite of the A340, in that the design prioritises passenger load over extreme range, although it can fly great distances if required.
The A380 has two full-length decks and a distinctive appearance, fat and stubby. It's a common sight in the skies over London because almost half of the 230-or-so A380s are operated by Emirates of the Middle East, ferrying Z-list celebrities and premier league footballers from Heathrow to Dubai and back.
Development began in the 1990s but after several delays the aircraft didn't enter service until 2007. At the time it was a big thing. Heathrow Airport's parent company spent around £400m modifying the airport to accommodate it, and the perceived need to support the A380 was one of several factors that slowed down construction of Berlin Brandenburg airport. Looking at articles from around that time there was a general view that the A380 was going to revolutionise commercial aviation, nay that it would revolutionise modern society. Its huge size was expected to bring down the cost of air travel while simultaneously benefiting the environment because there would be a need for fewer flights.
There were claims that launch customers would install casinos, gyms, even shower cubicles in the top deck; the New York Times ran a story, quickly withdrawn, that Airbus planned to sell a standing-room-only version to Asian carriers that would carry 853 passengers propped against padded boards on short-haul flights. The problem is that Airbus' sums only made sense if the A380 was filled to capacity, and as mentioned earlier that's hard to do with giant-sized airliners.
Furthermore the A380 was introduced at a very poor time for the global economy. The recession didn't impact the Far and Middle East as much as it did the United States, and for a while the order book bounced back, but it was only a temporary reprieve. A combination of rising fuel prices and the unwieldy size of the aircraft meant that sales collapsed in the mid-2010s. The A380 is relatively efficient as a short-haul-high-capacity aircraft, but the size means that it can't fly to the same airports as the 777, 787, and A350, and it's not as efficient over ultra-long-haul routes as the 777. In general it's more economical than the Boeing 747-8, and in retrospect it seems as if Airbus became fixated on the idea of beating the 747-8 even though neither aircraft had much of a future.
The sad thing is that the A380 is by all accounts a great plane if you're a passenger. I've been on one and I have no complaints. The interior is spacious, the fittings are state-of-the-art, and to date there have been no major accidents. This doesn't change the fact that from a financial point of view the A380 has been a failure. The running costs are so high that when Emirates retires its fleet the A380 is likely to disappear from service very quickly. Airbus spent around $25bn developing the A380 and apparently needed to sell around 1,000 units to break even, but to date it has only sold 240 and production has slowed to a trickle. Airbus can take solace from the fact that Boeing spent even more on the 787 - around $32bn - albeit that the 787 is still in production and still selling.
The inside of an A380, with two of my favourite things - pretzels and gin.
And that's the current state of the market. The long-established Boeing 777 is the dominant ultra-long-haul airliner, with the 787 and Airbus A350 second and third respectively. The A380 is still theoretically in production, and the Boeing 747 and Airbus A340 are gradually flying off into the sunset or the sunrise depending on the direction of travel, but metaphorically the sunset.
Historically the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, Douglas DC-10, and McDonnell Douglas MD-11 trijets also flew long-haul routes, albeit with stops, but they're gone now, as is the Vickers VC-10, which had four engines mounted on the tail. The Russians had the Ilyushin IL-62, which resembled the VC-10, but it was a rare sight in Western airports. In theory the modern-day Ilyushin Il-96 can be configured as an ultra-long-haul airliner, but only a handful were ever built and it's unclear if any remain in passenger service.
And of course there was Concorde. Singapore Airlines briefly flew Concorde into Hong Kong in the late 1970s, but it was just a publicity stunt and the route only lasted a year. The Far East wasn't a great fit for the aircraft. From Europe the route was too long to fly non-stop, and in any case the flight would have been mostly overland, which meant that the aircraft would have been forbidden from breaking the sound barrier. Flights from Australia or within the Far East itself might have been technically viable, but during Concorde's heyday the market wasn't large enough to support it.
Nonetheless Concorde did occasionally visit Hong Kong as a chartered flight. There is footage on the internet of Concorde landing at Kai Tak, which must have been exciting to watch in person. After touchdown the pilots would have walked tall. The Concorde was touted as Europe's answer to the Apollo Project, and like Apollo it majored on romance over practicality. It entered the market at a time when airliners came in different shapes and sizes, but that was a long time ago. Nowadays airliners are hard to tell apart; they have evolved to fit their environment, with two engines mounted under the wings, a single deck, a eurowhite fuselage, a modest logo on the tail.
So, some of the romance has gone. But air travel is cheaper, safer, less environmentally damaging and more practical than ever before, and with that I must leave you, dear reader. There's no more to say about ultra-long-haul and the hour is getting late. Sleep tight, dear reader, there is nothing on the other side.
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