I'm glad you like the view. It's the same view for about 18 hours. Peter Cade/Getty Images
If you've ever traveled from the Americas to Europe or Asia, you're probably familiar with the longest direct flights. These commercial flight routes across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans can take more than 10 hours to complete, but what is the duration of the longest flight in the world?
To understand how flight paths are measured in distance, it helps to know a geometric concept called great circle distance. Essentially, great circle distance is the shortest distance between two points along the circumference of a sphere, such as the Earth.
All route flights quoted in this article are based on estimated great circle distances between two airports. However, in the real world, commercial aircraft often deviate from the optimal route to avoid bad weather, other aircraft, or closed airspace boundaries. The actual distances will probably be a bit longer than the quoted distances on paper.
Here, we've ranked the longest flights by time, not distance. After all, when you're crammed into an economy seat and wondering how the lucky passengers in business class are doing, you're usually thinking about how many hours you have left on the plane, not how far your destination is.
