I Took The World's Longest Nonstop Flight

And lost my mind in the process

Oct 25, 2024

Having the chance to fly business class on the world’s longest non-stop flight sounds like it should be some sort of triumphant moment of human achievement. You know—like an icon of what modern technology can do for us: take us from New York to Singapore in one seamless 19-hour, uninterrupted straight shot, as if “distance” and “time” are outdated concepts that we’ve collectively outgrown.

As I settled into Seat 16F on Singapore Airlines Flight 23, that was certainly the attitude I had. This was exciting! A journey I thought would have to be broken up across continents and airlines was suddenly streamlined.

My home for the flight was a sort of pod, a wide leather chair that reclines into a large footwell and can on-demand be turned by the crew into a luxurious padded bed. The space is dominated by a huge TV screen just inches from your face and there are various cubby holes to lose your passport in.

Once settled in, I was immediately struck by the fact that no one seemed to acknowledge that we were about to be in the sky for almost an entire day. Everyone remains disturbingly calm, as though an 19-hour flight is a perfectly reasonable thing to submit your body and brain to. No one seems to be thinking, “Hang on, isn’t this a bit much?”

I am sat in a middle seat and have someone next to me who either speaks no English or speaks it so well that he’s already determined I’m not worth engaging with. We lock eyes for about two and a half seconds before he reaches out and slides the privacy screen between us, as if to say, “Whatever happens in this seat, we will not be experiencing it together.”

On the ground, a flurry of flight attendants and crew bustle around, taking orders for the three to four meal services that will be provided and distributing the socks you only find on planes and in hospitals to prevent blood clots. So concerned they may kill a passenger, Singapore Airlines does not even have an Economy-class cabin on this route, offering only Premium Economy and Business Class, the latter of which has 70 seats. The captain comes on to inform us that he and four other pilots will be operating the flight in shifts while a constantly rotating crew of flight attendants will look after us, between taking rests in a break room built into the back of this Airbus A350. Due to the war in Russia, the route will take across the North Pole, over Europe, the Middle East, India and then down into Southeast Asia before touching down in Singapore two days later on Thursday at 5:30 in the morning.

Hour 1: It Begins

But it’s not Thursday yet. It’s Tuesday night in New York and it’s 10:30 AM Wednesday in Singapore1. I’m supposed to be awake, realigning my circadian rhythms to Singaporean time, but the cabin has already taken on that ethereal quality—lights dimming, the hum of the engines like white noise wrapping around us, a low murmur of voices quickly dissipating as people surrender to their pillows the moment the seatbelt sign is off.

But not me. I have my coffee. My other neighbour in the window seat stared at me when I ordered it from Priscilla the flight attendant, but I’m convinced if I let myself drift off now, I’ll wake up in some kind of jet-lagged fever dream where I’ve watched all eight Harry Potter films and tried to start my first novel – both activities equally regrettable in their own way.

I refuse the meal service, something about a full steak dinner at this time of night does not appeal.

This is going to be the most productive 19 hours of my life. A novel and three movies down? Maybe I’ll learn a bit of conversational Malay from Duolingo just to mix it up.

I pull out my notebook, a cherished recent gift from someone bored of hearing my endless ideas that will likely never become anything and who realised they would be better written down. There’s something about the cabin air that makes the mind restless but unproductive. I convince myself that writing these notes will keep me from slipping into the darkness of sleep. I’m holding on. For now.

Hour 2: I Shall Overcome

Bored already of my own thoughts, I begin browsing through the absurdly large Singapore Airlines movie library. From budget Chinese flicks to Hollywood blockbusters they have it all. Normally on planes I find myself watching the same things, Crazy Rich Asians, Notting Hill, a Transformers movie, something to just make the time go by.

I settle tonight on Bad Boys: Ride or Die. I hit play. Five minutes later I give up on Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Instead, I settled for Firebrand, about Queen Katherine Parr and her travails being married to an ageing and increasingly grotesque Henry VIII —a movie about Tudor England while I’m hurtling over the Atlantic on a Singaporean Airbus. At this altitude, history becomes a bit of a blur.

With the film finished, my finger hovers for a moment over Mad Max: Fury Road but I instead opt to dip into my book, a biography of the explorer Richard Burton. He’d have hated this. I manage a few pages before putting it down.

Every single element of the aeroplane is trying to lull me to sleep. The lights are down. The flight attendants have vanished, but in their wake have left Kit Kats on my seat. The white noise of the engines hypnotises me. My fellow passengers are completely silent and could be dead for all I know. But I must stay awake. I continue to fidget with things, each an attempt to anchor me and keep my eyes open.

I begin listening to a Spotify playlist my friend sent me, it’s mostly intense Eurodance and in the darkness I listen to it. Adagio for Strings pulses in my ears as I watch the tiny model plane inch across the moving map on my screen. It’s surreal, like some strange version of a silent disco that’s gone on too long. The only lights are the red ones from the plane’s wings, flashing against the blackened sky.

Eventually I stand up to go to the bathroom and when I come back, I find that my bed has been mysteriously prepared for me, though I never asked for it. The blankets are tucked just so, the pillow fluffed to perfection. I lie down, my body heavy with exhaustion, and for a brief moment, I feel a wave of relief. I close my eyes and drop my eye mask.

Hours 3-11: The Dark Ages

I sleep soundly, or at least I think I do. Dreams blur with reality in this pressurised tomb.

In one, I'm Richard Burton crossing the Arabian desert, except the sand dunes are made of aeroplane blankets and Priscilla keeps appearing as a Bedouin guide offering Kit Kats instead of water.

I surface occasionally, like a deep-sea creature rising for air. Each time, the cabin looks exactly the same – that liminal space between day and night, reality and dreams. During one of these moments of consciousness, I check Burton's biography on my armrest. He once spent 96 hours crossing a desert without sleep, I read, before the words swim away from me.

Even in my semi-conscious state, I can hear him scoffing at my luxurious delirium. The seatbelt sign chimes, my only measure of time passing.

Hour 11: Hydrate or Diedrate

I wake up at some indeterminate hour to the sound of clinking cutlery and the bustling of flight attendants who have suddenly reappeared. The scent of Singapore’s famous chicken rice lingers over the business class cabin. Discarding my eye mask, the flight map tells me we’re over Azerbaijan—still seven and a half hours to go. Seven. And. A. Half. More. Hours. Welcome to the Deep Vein Thrombosis Express, as my friend Mike Bird called it days before I flew.

I get up to stretch my legs, wandering the aisles like some sort of lost, jet-lagged ghost. I stretch. I moisturise. I drink more water than any human should while airborne, silently wishing for one of those Dune-style water recycling suits. I notice that while I slept, a flight attendant has kindly deposited another Kit Kat on my armrest— which I immediately devour.

While I sit poised in my pod to await my chicken rice, I dive into my book on Richard Burton, the explorer, whose restless spirit makes me feel both inspired and ashamed—ashamed because, while he crossed deserts on foot and braved hostile territories, I am struggling to sit in a climate-controlled capsule with a fully reclining seat and chicken satay on demand. Burton really *would* have hated this.

The food is fantastic, the flight attendant Priscilla shows me all the sauces I need to mix and the sweet chili very briefly wakes me up.

Hour 12-15: The Aeroplane Eats My Soul

After the meal, the lights suddenly go out again, plunging the cabin into that familiar, unsettling dimness. Priscilla, my most recent anchor to reality, has vanished. Why am I still in the air? Haven’t we already lived this moment? I stand up. I sit down. I listen to music. I listen to the engines. It’s all the same now.

Craving something to pull me out of my existential haze, I turn to the movie library and land on The Menu. It seemed like a good idea at the time, having not seen it before. Within minutes, I regret everything.2 I begin to experience an existential crisis, how am I any different up here to Ralph Fiennes’ captive diners. I pause the movie for one of my endless bathroom breaks and also take a snack from the galley, a bun that exclaims it is the “HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH!”

As I put my headphones back on, I resolve that I need to get off the aeroplane. I look at the map to consider exit points and realise we are still over Azerbaijan.3

I finish the movie, however, unlike the diners my fate has not been resolved and I am still in the air. I cheer myself up by using the in-flight Wi-Fi to doom scroll, which then stops working over India. This flight is the height of human lunacy, the pinnacle of our collective delusion that we’ve conquered nature.

Hour 16: Panic in the Skies

I am still in the air, which shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, except it very much is. We’ve entered the stage of the flight that feels like a dark purgatory where the boundaries between time and space, and even my own sense of self, are rapidly eroding. The problem with a 19-hour flight, I’ve realised, isn’t just the sheer duration but the absolute, soul-crushing knowledge that there is no escape. You can’t get off. You can’t leave the cabin, the pod, the carefully curated luxury, because there is literally nowhere to go. You are trapped in this tube of metal hurtling across the sky at impossible speeds, and even the HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH bun (which I’ve obviously eaten) can’t ease the growing sense of claustrophobia.

And here’s the thing: we’re all pretending like it’s fine. Every one of us, tucked away in our individual cocoons, isolated by noise-canceling headphones and privacy screens, is quietly participating in this mass delusion. We’ve been up here for 16 hours, and yet, the man across the aisle still smiles politely when Priscilla asks if she’d like more champagne. Is no one else slowly coming apart? I walk the length of the plane and even in Premium Economy, everyone seems to be carrying on just fine.

Am I the only one who feels like their mind is slipping out of sync with their body? I peek through the privacy screen and my seat mate is watching a live football game, which I think he has been doing since we took off.

I realise this sounds melodramatic, but that’s only because you’ve likely never been on a 19-hour flight where the airline pampers you to the point of disorientation. It’s luxury that borders on an existential crisis. I have every comfort at my fingertips, and yet, I want nothing more than to escape, to breathe air that doesn’t come from a recycled filtration system, to walk on ground that isn’t moving at 600 miles per hour.

I press my hand against the window near the galley, feeling the cold seep through. Burton once wrote about the desert's ability to drive men mad with its endless horizons. At least he had horizons. All I have is this artificial atmosphere and the growing suspicion that this flight is actually a psychological experiment in human endurance.

Hour 17: Everything is Fine

The change comes not gradually but all at once, like surfacing from a deep dive. Perhaps it's the way the light suddenly streams through the windows, painting familiar shapes across the cabin. Or maybe it's the fact that Burton, in my book, has just emerged triumphant from another impossible journey. If he could cross deserts on camelback, surely I can cross continents in a flying luxury hotel. The Wi-Fi is back. We're no longer over Azerbaijan. Priscilla appears with another Kit Kat, and I accept it not as an offering from the gods of air travel, but as the simple comfort it is.

The lights are back on in the cabin, and just like when the lights go up in a nightclub after hours of sweaty, joyful oblivion, the sudden illumination feels like a harsh reminder of the reality we’ve been avoiding. The passengers around me, once blissfully cocooned in their pods of dark, mid-flight serenity, now look like extras in a disaster movie, sleep-deprived, hair slightly askew, faces drawn with the unmistakable pallor of recycled aeroplane air.

I am, at long last, at peace with my fate. The rhythm of the engines, once ominous, now feels like a familiar lullaby. I’ve become a fully functioning part of this airborne ecosystem. Look at me—I’m hydrated, I’ve moisturised three times, and I’ve eaten the HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH.

The Wi-Fi goes out again. Priscilla has vanished once more, as though she’s some kind of fairy who appears only when I start to lose faith in the human condition. For a brief moment, I feel that old twinge of panic. The existential uncertainty returns, like a subtle tremor beneath my feet, reminding me that no matter how many Kit Kats I get, I am still trapped, endlessly circling over Azerbaijan.

Hour 18: A Slow Descent

I should be excited right now. We’re so close to landing. But instead of excitement, all I feel is this creeping dread, like my body is finally rebelling after 17 hours of pretending it’s fine. My legs ache from sitting too long. My back feels compressed, despite the luxury of a flatbed seat.

A brief visit to the bathroom is where I face the full brunt of what 18 hours in the air does to a human face.

My body is confused, my mind is fuzzy, and I’m starting to wonder how long it really has been, perhaps the map has been lying to me.

I attempt to read again, but the words blur together on the page. Richard Burton’s adventures in the Arabian desert feel strangely distant – probably because my own adventure is less “braving the elements” and more “surviving the fifth viewing of Crazy Rich Asians.”

The captain appears on the intercom, if he really is the captain, and explains we are now beginning our descent into Singapore Changi Airport. The cabin is secured, and we begin to get lower and lower and I slowly mentally begin to return to Earth.

Hour 19: Arrival

The wheels touch down with a gentle bump that seems almost anticlimactic after 19 hours of flight. As we taxi to the gate, the first hints of Singapore's tropical dawn paint the sky in shades of pink and gold.

Burton once wrote about the moment of arriving in a new land, how the body knows it's somewhere different before the mind catches up. He was right – even through the aircraft's walls, I can feel Singapore's characteristic humidity reaching out to greet us.

We deplane into Changi Airport's vast terminus where a massive indoor waterfall thunders nearby – nature perfectly contained and controlled, much like our journey here. My fellow passengers disperse quickly, some still wearing their aeroplane pyjamas, others already changed into crisp business attire as if the last 19 hours were merely a strange dream.

I've crossed continents in a single bound, traded day for night and back again, and somehow emerged mostly intact. My phone buzzes – it's an email from Singapore Airlines about my return flight in two weeks. I quickly swipe it away. I don’t need to think about that right now, I have a flight connection to Malaysia to catch.

Terra Nullius, by Ned Donovan

Discussion about this post