Real Girls: How long is the world’s shortest commercial flight?


	August 13, 2024

Original photo by murat4art/ iStock

The world's shortest commercial flight takes less than one minute.

Passengers aboard Loganair Flight LM711, which travels 1.7 miles between the Scottish islands of Westray and Papa Westray, are airborne very briefly. On a good day, the world's shortest commercial flight takes less than a minute — as little as 53 seconds, in fact. There's no co-pilot, no lavatory, and only eight passengers aboard the Britten-Norman BN-2 Islander aircraft. Tickets for the journey, which is made just two or three times a day, cost roughly $22. Both Westray and Papa Westray are part of the Orkney archipelago, a sparsely populated set of islands that have proved popular with adventurous travelers in search of a scenic journey that happens to include a record-setting flight.

Most of the world's other shortest flights are likewise between islands. Those who'd prefer not to take the hour-long ferry connecting the Greek isles of Karpathos and Kasos can instead fly between them in just five minutes. Meanwhile, passengers flying the 12 miles from Sint Maarten (one of the Netherlands' constituent countries) to Anguilla (a British Overseas Territory) can expect to be in the air for closer to 10 minutes.

Scotland doesn't have an official national anthem.

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Scotland's national animal is the __.

REVEAL ANSWER

		Numbers Don't Lie

Full-time residents of Papa Westray

~80

Passenger capacity of the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft

853

Islands in Scotland, 94 of which are inhabited

790

Year the Loch Ness monster was first written about

565

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The world's longest flight is between Newark and Singapore.

On the opposite end of the flight length spectrum is Singapore Airlines Flight 21, a 10,644-mile journey between New Jersey and Singapore with a scheduled length of 18 hours and 50 minutes (a mere 18 hours and 18 minutes under optimal conditions). The daily trek crosses 13 time zones and usually flies over at least a dozen countries. It's the world's longest flight, edging out the route between San Francisco, California, and Bengaluru, India, which takes closer to 17 hours and 50 minutes, as well as Qantas' flight from Perth, Australia, to London, England (17 hours and 45 minutes).

Today's edition of Interesting Facts was written by Michael Nordine and edited by Brooke Robinson.