Hong Kong’s flagship airline Cathay Pacific will launch one of its longest non-stop services in December, a thrice-weekly service to Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand.

The non-stop Christchurch service is set to operate three times a week, with an Airbus A350 aircraft departing Hong Kong on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Subject to regulatory approvals, the new service will operate between December 1, 2017 and February 28, 2018 and will complement Cathay Pacific’s current seasonal double daily flights to Auckland.

The airline also shares flights with Air New Zealand’s daily service between Hong Kong and Auckland. The biggest benefit is that Christchurch passengers will not have to transit Auckland to make connections to Asia and and beyond cutting 3-4 hours off the average long haul trip on these routes.

I first flew with Cathay Pacific in 1979 on a brand new new “Jumbo Jet” from Sydney to Hong Kong (In first class! – but that is a whole other story…), the 7,400km trip took nearly 10 hours which was about the maximum range of these large jets at the time.

38 years later, the new A350’s Cathay are planning to use on this new route will cover the 9,500km’s in around 12 hours. The Airbus A350 and Boeing’s equivalent 787 Dreamliner are a new generation of aircraft that are opening up long distance routes all over the world and making non-stop connections that where only dreamed about a few years ago.

The great thing for the travelling public is that relatively remote places like New Zealand all of a sudden have become a lot more accessible as airlines look to fill their new aircraft with passengers.

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