Cathay Pacific's 10,000+ Mile New York Flight

do Chinese airlines still use Russian airpace to fly to us or eu? How about Korean and Japanese flights to NYC? Do they go the other way around?

Bet you’d love to be on that flight Ben, except you probably wouldn’t want my son and I sitting behind you like on that flight from HK to YYZ, a few years ago.

Chinese airlines use Russian airspace for most of their European and North American routes.

Japanese and Korean airlines are presently not doing so (although Korean carriers were doing so until around a week ago).

The primary foreign users of Russian airspace at present are carriers from China, India, Turkey, Iran, UAE and Qatar - as well as many of the former Soviet states like Kazakhstan and Belarus.

thanks, so it is up to the airline to decide? I thought Eu or USA won't let airlines that pass through Russian airpace land in their airports but it seems like it is airlines' choice, meaning it is an advantage for airlines to choose to pass the russian airspace.

For japanese and korean airlines, is it more difficult or they go around the pacific for shorter flights? From the pictures, it looks like it is more challenging for them than Cathay

Flying Seoul to Bucharest soon... we'll see how they go

I doubt that this has anything to do with safety - its much safer to fly over peaceful and uninhabited Siberia than to fly an extra 2 hours in the air elsewhere. To the extent this isn't cheap virtue signaling, I an only imagine that its an issue with payment systems and other logistics to pay Russia for overflights and to organize for the potential of irregular flight operations if a plane is forced to land in Russia. In any case, this seems ridiculous to me - but won't affect me as I'm not willing to deal with Hong Kong's silly quarantine rules as much as I'd like to make a trip there.

How will the return flight go?

Agreed, so instead of flying over a safe empty void of siberia lets fly right up to the edge of Ukraine! Where are all the greenies complaining about all the extra fuel this is wasting.

Glad I am not in need of flying

Likely taking advantage of the jet-stream still by going over Japan, Alaska, and Canada. That routing is only about 8800 miles, only about 800 miles longer than the polar route via Russia.

Does anyone know what is going on with Cathay First? They seem to have stopped selling first class seats to NYC and London, right? I guess the A350 doesn't have first class, though they don't seem to be selling first class on flights scheduled for the 777 either. So does that mean they are basically shutting down first class for the foreseeable future? Hopefully I'm missing something.

That is just too long to sit on a plane in business, let alone economy. Unless first is available I’d just as soon connect somewhere along the way and stretch my legs.

The "greenies" realize it's not the smartest time to be flying over Russian airspace...moron.

This should be very interesting

I assume the BOS to HKG flight will follow a similar route when that restarts in August; provided the conflict is still ongoing?

Will they use the former route or this longer route for calculating Loyalty Points earned?