Non stop flight to London

Does anyone know when the first non stop flight from London to Hong Kong and vice versa commenced?

daaaaaaaaaaang!!! you guys piqued my curiosity and i log in every day to see whats the answer !! i trawled the net too but i guess i was half asleep and dint do too well.

Well, Starlionblue2 was banned for having a sense of humor. That's why he didn't get back to you.


The answer (with a high degree of certainty) was eventually posted here in reply 6: http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/3748780/



"The Boeing 747-200 was the first civil aircraft that had the range to fly LHR-HKG non-stop. However in its early days there were problems in obtaining rights to over-fly Russian and Chinese airspace so flights had to detour via the Gulf and Indian sub continent. The great circle route - the shortest distance between the two cities - is 5,205nm. The old route was 6,277nm. Today's route is about 500nm shorter, shaving an hour off the flight and saving 13 tons of fuel.


CX started to operate HKG-LGW at the same time as British Caledonian who initially used their DC 10-30s LGW-DXB-HKG. However, I have a very rare BCal paperweight that is engraved "First non-stop flight LGW-HKG - June 1984" that was given to First Class passengers to celebrate the first time a Western airline was allowed to overfly Russian airspace en route to HKG. I am unable to confirm if BCal was the first airline to operate LGW-HKG non-stop but my contact seems to recall their 747-200s were later used on the route as the picture below would confirm and operated a weekly non-stop in the mid 1980s as well as 3 x weekly LGW-DXB-HKG with the DC 10s."

Exacty !!!!!!!!!


no one seems to know the date and I did see both these posts when i trawled the net.. so i wasnt asleep .