Air India has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, and you could laugh at this one or take it seriously depending on your reading of Air India. A couple of days back, The Times of India reported about Air India’s plans to launch the longest flight in the world, a title that rests with Qantas at the moment for their Dallas Fort Worth – Sydney flight, and can be passed over to Emirates when they launch their Dubai – Panama City flight shortly.
Air India is planning to launch a flight connecting Bengaluru (BLR) with San Francisco (SFO), which will be a range of 8701 miles, beating the current DFW-SYD flight of 8578 miles, and the longest flight designate (DXB-PTY) which is going to be 8588 miles when it starts to operate earlier next year.
What is the plan exactly here? First, no one is totally sure about the whole plan about this flight, apart from the origin and destination. Air India is planning to use their remaining 2 Boeing 777-LR planes to operate this flight, while 5 out of the 8 they bought were sold to Etihad a while ago, and the 6th plane is lying in storage for a while.
An expected announcement is perhaps going to happen when the Indian Prime Minister arrives in California later this week. Or perhaps this piece of information could just be a sound-bite for his trip and this route will never take off? Lets hope while they are at it they can also get us US Pre-Clearance at Mumbai and Delhi?
What do you guys think about this announcement? Will it be just noise or something that can happen with the new price of oil?
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I hope US CBP Preclearance never comes to India (or, for that matter, any other places that doesn’t currently have CBP Preclearance). US CBP Preclearance is not a good way to improve my travel experiences to the US. Amongst its problems, it creates another bottleneck before travel and is a more expensive way to operate when it comes to processing passengers (relative to doing so in the US where economies of scale are easier to achieve). AUH should have been a lesson in what kind of messes it can create.
USA pre clearance in New Delhi will be a good idea idea of that goes through.
I hope US CBP Preclearance never comes to India (or, for that matter, any other places that doesn’t currently have CBP Preclearance). US CBP Preclearance is not a good way to improve my travel experiences between to the US.
Wasn’t SIA planning for the world’s longest flight in 2017 which is going to be from SIN to some airport and ain’t Emirates planning for a DXB-Panama which Is going the be the worlds longest flight April 2016 onwards.
@Shubham I wrote there about the DXB-PTY flight already.
Yeah, I just realised it.
Good idea since the IT crowd has to change flights at DXB, FRA etc for SFO