The world's longest flights, and the belt you never take off

The world's longest scheduled flight is Singapore Airlines' service between Singapore and New York, close to 15,300 kilometres in up to nineteen hours on an Airbus A350-900ULR. From October 2027, Qantas Project Sunrise goes further still: Sydney to London nonstop, around twenty hours. These are flights measured in sunrises, not hours.

Singapore Airlines relaunched its Newark route in 2018 and now flies both New York airports, JFK and Newark, back to Changi. The aircraft is built for the distance: the A350-900ULR carries only 161 passengers, in business and premium economy alone, with an oversized fuel load and a cabin tuned for rest. Nineteen hours is not a journey you power through. It is one you settle into.

Ultra-long-haul is not new, only newly comfortable. In 1936, Pan American flew a Martin M-130 flying boat from San Francisco to Hawaii nonstop, about 3,860 kilometres in 19 hours and 36 minutes, at a time when the ocean below held no diversion airport at all. Forty years later, the Boeing 747SP let Pan Am stretch the record again: New York to Tokyo in 1976, then San Francisco to Sydney the same year, close to 11,900 kilometres and the first nonstop between North America and Australia. Every generation of aircraft has redrawn the same map, a little further each time.

Today the top of the table belongs almost entirely to the southern and eastern hemispheres. Singapore Airlines holds the two longest flights in the world, Singapore to JFK and to Newark, both above 15,300 kilometres. Behind them come Qatar Airways from Doha to Auckland at around 17 hours, Qantas from Perth to London, and Air New Zealand from Auckland to New York. The list reshuffles every few years as a new aircraft or a new route arrives. Project Sunrise will not just join it. It will top it.

Project Sunrise belongs to the same tradition as the great routes that came before it: journeys so significant that their names become symbols of distance and discovery. That idea runs through the Fly-Belts collection.

AUSTRAL evokes the extreme southern routes that Project Sunrise is about to redraw, where flights grow longer and the red earth marks the edge of the familiar world. RUNWAY represents the strip of grey from which every great route begins. POLAR follows the shortcut over the top of the world, a corridor known to seasoned long-haul travellers. TRANSATLANTIC recalls the crossing that brought Europe and North America closer and helped define modern air travel. PACIFIC looks towards the longest ocean crossings, with nothing but sky and water for hours in every direction. SILK ROAD traces a route travelled for thousands of years, first by caravans and now by aircraft linking East and West. TROPIC marks the invisible line of the equator, crossed at altitude without a border, runway or sign below. AMAZONAS follows the vast green corridor of South America, an uninterrupted landscape visible only from above.

They are not flight numbers, but routes, crossings and landscapes translated into colours and worn on the ground. Their aviation-inspired buckles and webbing reproduce the visual language of the aircraft cabin in belts designed specifically for everyday wear.

The map of the possible keeps stretching. Each time the record moves, a city that used to sit two flights away becomes one. The next time it moves, it will be measured in a sunrise you fly straight through. Wear the plane.