Travel question: Are all direct flights non-stop?

Q Are all direct flights non-stop?

Yunus P

A The short answer is no. A non-stop flight goes straight from A to B and does not stop to refuel. Most flights these days are like this: Heathrow to New York JFK, Manchester to Barcelona, Edinburgh to Dubai and so on.

A direct flight is a journey where you do not need to change planes. Therefore all non-stop flights are direct.

But while most direct flights are non-stop, there are many exceptions. The two daily flights from Heathrow to Sydney are good examples: both British Airways BA15 and Qantas QF2 stop to refuel in Singapore. They are direct but not non-stop.

Many of the BA and Virgin Atlantic flights to smaller islands in the Caribbean, such as Grenada and Tobago, stop en route in Antigua, Barbados or St Lucia. That is for commercial rather than technical reasons. Planes could happily fly non-stop from the UK to these destinations, but there is not felt to be the market to sustain such links.

In the olden days multi-stop flights were normal. British Airways used to fly Manchester-Rome-Dubai-Bombay (now Mumbai)-Bangkok-Hong Kong, for example.

These days multi-stops on routes that are not limited by range are rare, though Southwest Airlines sells some in the US – for example Denver via Burbank to Oakland.

The extreme distances in Russia can create a kind of Siberian hopscotch – such as Ural Airlines flight 366 from Vladivostok via the cities of Irkutsk and Yekaterinburg to St Petersburg, taking over 14 hours. But clear winner is the Norwegian regional airline, Wideroe, and its flight WF974 from Tromso to Kirkenes via Sorkjosen, Hammerfest, Mehamn, Berlevag and Vadso – adding five calling points to a point-to-point journey of only 264 miles.

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