The longest commercial flights ever (in time airborne) were the Qantas ‘double sunrise’ between Perth and Sri Lanka after the 1942 fall of Singapore made other routes impossible. The 6500km (4,400 miles) flight took between 27-33 hours. The flights were conducted using stripped out Catalinas, flying the entire way in radio silence.
Here's a great article about it:
Many years ago, by BIL flew AWACS over the middle east. They would leave Oklahoma and be in the air for a week or so. Multiple crews and inflight refueling; Air crews from Tinker would spend three weeks in Saudi Arabia before returning to Tinker.
ReplyDeleteThis was a 33 hour nonstop flight without air-to-air refueling. But it flew at only 125mph, carrying only 3 passengers and a few bags of mail. The PBY was built for long, slow ocean patrols. AFAIK, even when not stripped down like the passenger service planes were, it has the longest time lingering aloft of any piston-powered airplane that was ever put into production for a practical purpose. (I phrased that to exclude one-off airplanes and airplanes built only for the purpose of setting a record, such as the Rutan Voyager, which made an unrefueled flight around the world in 9 days.)
ReplyDeleteLarge modern jet liners flying at nearly 600mph can make much longer distances between landings to refuel, but in a shorter time. Most military planes now can refuel in the air, so flight time is limited only by crew fatigue or maintenance requirements. Aerial refueling experiments began in the 1920's with a hose passed between two biplanes, and also passing cans of oil when needed. On 27–28 August 1923, the United States Army Air Service kept a DH4 biplane in flight for 37 hours with 9 aerial refuelings; this may beat the PBY non-refueled record.