Why your long-haul flights are going to take even longer
YOUR next long-haul flight is likely to take much longer when heading on your next holiday abroad.
Travellers visiting south-east Asia will face being longer in the sky due to the current dispute between Ukraine and Russia.
Many airlines have been forced to divert flights due to the ongoing crisis, which will affect flights from the UK.
According to , airlines including KLM and Lufthansa have been forced to cancel and divert routes.
British Airways has also been forced to divert their flights as well with a BA pilot claiming on social media a flight took longer due to "current geopolitics".
This means passengers travelling to destinations such as Thailand are likely to have longer flights.
And with Thailand welcoming Brits back, and with summer holidays seeing a huge travel boom, this is likely to cause delays and longer flights for holidaymakers.
Ukraine airspace is yet to fully close, although could result in more travel disruptions if it does.
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Despite advances in technology and increasingly better planes, flights are actually slower now than before.
For example, back in the 1970s, a flight from New York to Houston, Texas, would take two hours and 37 minutes.
These days, it will take three hours and 50 minutes.
According to the , cruising speeds for commercial planes are between 480 and 510 knots these days, while they used to be 525 knots on a Boeing 707 plane in the 1960s.
There is a simple reason for this - money. The price of oil has skyrocketed in that time and airlines are trying to be fuel-efficient.
And a Which? report in 2018 found that airlines were extending their flight times so they could avoid compensation and "pat themselves on the back for being on time”.
However, many refuted these claims.
