Featured Map for 25 February 2024:
Longest Flights from Singapore

The Singapore Airshow ended today. Many attendees will be flying home from Singapore on some very long non-stop flights. Here are the ten longest by distance, compiled by Pang Yee Huat using schedule data from Cirium. (Aircraft type informaition is from a mix of FlightAware and FlightRadar24.)

Route	Destination	Distance	Airline	Aircraft	Time
SIN-JFK	New York (JFK)	9,537 mi / 15,348 km	Singapore	A350-900	18:05
SIN-EWR	Newark	9,534 mi / 15,344 km	Singapore	A350-900	17:50
SIN-LAX	Los Angeles	8,770 mi / 14,113 km	Singapore	A350-900	15:10
SIN-SFO	San Francisco	8,446 mi / 13,593 km	Singapore	A350-900	14:30
			United	787-9	14:50
SIN-SEA	Seattle	8,070 mi / 12,988 km	Singapore	A350-900	14:10
SIN-MAN	Manchester	6,810 mi / 10,959 km	Singapore	A350-900	14:25
			TUI Airways	787-8	15:00
SIN-BHX	Birmingham	6,803 mi / 10,948 km	TUI Airways	787-9	15:10
SIN-LHR	London (Heathrow)	6,765 mi / 10,887 km	British	777-300ER, 787-9	14:20
			Qantas	A380	14:50
			Singapore	A380 (2x), 777-300ER	14:10
SIN-LGW	London (Gatwick)	6,758 mi / 10,876 km	TUI Airways	787-8	14:45
SIN-CDG	Paris (de Gaulle)	6,666 mi / 10,729 km	Air France	777-300ER	14:45
			Singapore	777-300ER	14:00

Notes:

1. TUI Airways flights operate once per week. Most or all of the flights by other airlines operate daily.
2. For London Heathrow, both British Airways and Singapore Airlines operate multiple frequencies using multiple aircraft types. Flight time is as reported by Ciricum and likely is not the same for all flights.

Today's Featured Map shows these ten routes. Some Featured Maps come together easily from an initial ideas; others are a struggle or simply fail to lead to a map which is worth one thousand words. This one was a struggle.

Choosing a projection was the first problem. The default for the ten paths led to a polar orthographic projection centered on the north pole which was visually interesting but overlapped the routes to New York and Newark, and clustered the five routes to Europe. Switching to a rectangular projection didn't help at all. An orthographc projection centered on Singapore was useless because all of the destinations were devoured by distant dragons lurking beyond the edge of the map. An azimuthal equidistant projection centered on Singapore vanquished the dragons but din't solve the trampling of routes, plus this projection tends to be more difficult to understand. I finally settled on the the initial polar orthographic projection as the least-bad choice.

Another problem was path colors. Featured Maps involving multiple airlines generally use a color associated with the airline, but with multiple carriers operating some of the same routes that was impossible. Well, a brief experiment with Bézier paths could have fixed that, and pulled apart some of the overlapping routes in the bargain, but that was quickly rejected as being too cluttered. The eventual solution was to use Singapore's gold for routes only operated by Singapore Airlines, and a color for the other airline if an airline besides Singapore serves the route. In the case of London Heathrow, that still left a choice between British Airways and Qantas; British Airways was chosen because they came first alphabetically (I feel your pain, Qantas) but they are also the home team at Heathrow and they have more frequencies on the route than Qantas.

Finally, the clustering of European destinations meant that the labels for the two London airports overlapped other lables. The solution to that was pure hack: a joint label for the two at a convenient location in Spain with a pointer to London. It's ugly, but it sort-of works.

There's a lot of science and math underpinning the maps, but sometimes creating maps that prove to be helpful illustrations are more art than science.

References and additional information:

• Singapore Airshow
• Singapore's Longest Flights – Pang Yee Huat on LinkedIn
• Cirium
• FlightAware
• FlightRadar24
  
  
• Air France
• British Airways
• Qantas Airways
• Singapore Airlines
• TUI Airways
• United Airlines