A little after 3 p.m. Tuesday, 260 people boarded a United Airlines jumbo jet at O’Hare International Airport, fastened their seatbelts and began a rendezvous with history.
They rumbled down the runway in the massive Boeing 747-400 and less than 16 hours later, set down in Hong Kong.
At 7,788 miles, it was the longest nonstop flight in aviation history.
It eclipses American Airlines’ 6,450-mile flight from Dallas to Tokyo; Northwest Airline’s longest nonstop, a 6,737-mile flight from New York to Tokyo; and what was United’s longest flight, Los Angeles to Sydney, 7,487 miles.
The route is made possible by a fascinating combination: satellites orbiting far above Earth, the Russian and Chinese governments and – God willing – favorable winds that will provide minimum resistance to the big 747 as it slices through the air at up to 600 mph.
For passengers, who no longer will have to set down in San Francisco or perhaps Tokyo to refuel, the new flight will trim as much as 51/2 hours and nearly 1,000 miles from their trip.
The travelers, most likely unaware of the technological and political breakthroughs that made Flight 895 possible, will be pampered by 18 flight attendants who will serve three meals and present three feature films (two of them with Chinese subtitles) in addition to four hours of video short subjects to help while away the time.
In the cockpit, as with other trans-Pacific flights, two teams of pilots will share flying duties. One captain and first officer will be at the controls at any given time as another captain and first officer relax behind them in a private compartment with bunks where they can sleep, read or listen to music. All will have at least 30 years of service.
Key to United’s ability to offer the nonstop route has been permission granted to the airline to use a northerly shortcut across Russia and China.
For the first time, pilots will be able to fly over large tracts of land where there are no navigation aides, relying on signals from a constellation of orbiting Global Positioning System satellites owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and available for commercial use to plot location.