I once took a 16-hour nonstop flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, and was too excited to sleep during any of it. In economy. But there are longer commercial flights, and a new record-breaker is set to begin in 2018. Qantas has announced their new non-stop service between Perth and London, 8,989 miles, at 17.5 hours in the air. That may sound horrid in the abstract, but it beats taking multiple flights with layovers for those who need to go from one end of the earth to the other.
I guess it’s all better than the travel times of the 1930s. Back in 1938 a trip from London to Brisbane, Australia (the longest on offer at the time) took 11 days and had over two dozen scheduled stops.
Tickets will go on sale in April of 2017, but no price has been announced.