Featured Map for 21 January 2012:
Singapore Airlines Eastbound To/From Newark

Singapore Airlines offers daily non-stop flights between Singapore and Newark using Airbus A340-500 aircraft configured with just 100 seats in an all-business configuration. At 8,285 nautical miles, this flight is near the limit of the A340-500's 9,000-nm range.

While the geodesic ("great circle") path between Sinapore and Newark is very nearly polar, coming within 128 nm of the north pole, winds cause the flights to be flown eastbound—in both directions. FlightAware only shows flight tracks across North America but the planned route including waypoints is included. Using data from DAFIF to map these waypoints to longitude/latitude pairs (no, GCmap does not yet include this data) the approximate flight paths can be plotted.

Today's Featured Map shows the approximate flight paths for SQ 22 SIN-EWR and SQ 21 EWR-SIN in purple along with estimates of their most northerly points. These paths are about 11.3% and 7.2% longer than the shortest, geodesic path, which is shown in red. The arctic circle is shown in blue; neither flight comes very close the the arctic region never mind the north pole.

References and additional information:

• Singapore Airlines
• Singapore Airlines – Seat Map for A340-500
• Airbus A340-500
• FlightAware
• FlightAware – Singapore Airlines (SQ) 22 – 19-Jan-2012 – WSSS-KEWR
• FlightAware – Singapore Airlines (SQ) 21 – 19-Jan-2012 – KEWR-WSSS