Reader Brian G. asks:
Your recent reader mail about international stopovers provides a reasonable segue for me to ask a question I’ve been pondering: is there a resource for identifying ALL of the non-stop flights from a given airport?
I initially thought of this question a couple of years ago while living in Alaska for the summer. Anchorage claims (and I have no reason to doubt) that Ted Stevens was the first North American airport with non-stop flights to both Europe and Asia. I started wondering if there were any airports in the world with non-stop, commercial flights to five continents (Antarctica is out and I’m not counting the continent of origin).In my experience airport websites are largely useless. Of course I can use various search engines and try origin and destination airports through educated guesses, but not all airlines are listed in all search engines, and it’s sometimes hard to tell if a flight is truly non-stop. Probably the most useful resources I found were airline route maps, but still that’s a lot of guessing and checking. (Singapore was my best guess [for an airport with flights to five continents], but I can’t find a non-stop to South America. Perhaps Johannesburg?)
Such a resource has a practical application: we’re using miles to go to (Europe? South America) next summer, but we don’t care where we fly to specifically – we just want a non-stop flight from SFO. I’d like to type in an airport code and get an alphabetical list of direct flights and their associated airlines. Any suggestions?
Suggestions, yes, but none that meet your criteria fully. But let’s back up:
First off, don’t forget that when airports claim to have X number of nonstop flights to various locations, that number can (and will) include cargo flights. Anchorage, for example, is laden with nonstop cargo flights to Asia. And even if a search picks those flights up, that’s not going to help you plan your travels.
Second, no, I haven’t found an airport that meets your 5-continent criteria. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Readers, any help here?
But back to your core question:
I don’t have a magic bullet for you. Like you’ve found, there is no single source for nonstops. The closest is OAG’s online tool for finding all direct flights from a given airport. Click it, enter the origin airport name or code, and it will list all the cities served. BUT: You need to dig deeper to find which airline services that city pair, and more importantly, you don’t see whether or not that flight is nonstop or not.
Similarly, you can try running searches on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website. But it’s not easy. You choose your variables and download flight data into an Excel spreadsheet. Have fun!
I also tried other sites that give great information on flights — flightstats.com and flightaware.com for example — but no luck there, either.
So… any of the myriad travel webmasters out there want to take the challenge? Who will create a site that creates a searchable database of all the nonstop flights (ideally with the operating airline included in the results) from airports around the world?
A note on lingo: In your question you use “direct” and “nonstop” interchangeably, even though you acknowledge that some flights aren’t really nonstop. In airline speak, a flight can be “direct” if the same flight number serves multiple cities. Say, if the same number is used for both a flight from Houston to Newark and the onward flight from Newark to Amsterdam, then Houston to Amsterdam is considered “direct,” even though there’s a connection (and maybe even a change of planes) in Newark. Flyer beware.
UPDATE: FareCompare.com CEO Rick Seaney hits the comments to point to his site’s nonstop-search feature. One catch: You have to choose the airline. Choose your airport/city, then choose the airline, and the site gives you the nonstops. Here’s the line Rick provided in comments, for New York City, to start the ball rolling. Replace “NYC” with the airport code of your choice to try for yourself:
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/-NYC/city.html
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September 6th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
I use wikipedia, do a google search for an airport of your choice, “lga airport wiki” for example. Then scroll down and users have done a good job of listing all non-stops.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Not only can you, but you can do it on the same airline on the same day. SAA flies direct to (for example) Sao Paolo, Perth, Hong Kong, IAD (Washington DC) and London, all from Johannesburg.
The same is true for Qantas/Sydney (Santiago, Johannesburg, LA, London and Tokyo, for instance).
London Heathrow also qualifies.
In the Americas, I’m not sure any city meets it, though I imagine we’re only a few years away from NYC-SYD direct.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Dubai will have non-stop flights to all continents as soon as the Emirates flight to Sao Paulo starts in October.
September 7th, 2007 at 1:32 am
cure – Sydney to London is not non-stop. Similarly I think Johannesburg to North America (JFK and Dulles) have a technical stop, although perhaps the reverse direction is non-stop?
Dubai will indeed have non-stop flights to 5 continents soon.
As for database of nonstop flights, I have this in spreadsheet form already including airlines. But it is not up to date – flight routes continually change and I don’t have the time to maintain it. I believe OAG (amongst others) has fairly comprehensive listings, but these charge a fee for use.
September 7th, 2007 at 5:05 am
LHR – SYD (and vice-versa) don’t count as non-stop since there is inevitably a stopover in SIN or BKK
September 7th, 2007 at 7:50 am
You can get the non-stops for a particular airline by using the following url:
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/-NYC/city.html
Just substitute the city code in all Caps (NYC in this case). The page has a list of all airlines that service the city and if you want to look at the non-stop cities just click the name of the airline. For example
clickin on American Airlines on this page takes you to:
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/American-AA/New_York-NYC/airlinenonstop.html which has the list of all airports in that city and the non-stop destinations.
City Codes are pretty much the same as airport codes except for large Metro Areas (CHI, NYC, DFW, …)
If anyone finds this useful we will add a simple input box “Airline Non-stops” with input of the airport code.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
oneworld.com has a java applet that allows you to click on a city on a wold map and it shows all the flights out of that city on One World airlines (american, british, jal, lan, quants). You can then click a link to see which flights it is talking about. It also allows to click a second city and connect it to the first. So if you click SFO and then DPS (Bali) you can see your choices are via Hong Kong or Tokyo. So if you are using one world miles it’s great.
September 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
whoops messed up the link. it is oneworld
September 7th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
You’re quite right about SYD-LHR.
I’m pretty sure that SAA offers (perhaps offered!) a direct to Johannesburg; I nearly booked it not too long ago. I vaguely remember a technical stop one way (Accra, or Guinea, perhaps?).
September 10th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Rick,
You are half-way there. You just need to integrate all the airlines. I am a software engineer, this is a simple job. It should not take more than a couple of days.
If you offer it, this would a very sexy service
September 10th, 2007 at 7:25 am
You’ll find SQ, TG, CX offering flights to all five continents, I guess – out of SIN, BKK and HKG.
September 10th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
What about Houston?
September 10th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
First off, thanks, Rick for chiming in here. Your site already rocks, but this would be a great little feature to add. So let me second RoadWarrior’s comments.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:03 am
“Singapore was my best guess [for an airport with flights to five continents], but I can’t find a non-stop to South America. Perhaps Johannesburg?”
I don’t understand this statement. Johannesburg is in Africa not South America.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:46 am
Singapore was his best guess for an airport with flights to five continents. Johannesburg his second guess.
September 24th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I’ve been collating the timetable from Star Alliance and Oneworld for a while now and run a Google maps app that only shows direct and single hop flights :
http://images.slc.com.au/map_flights.pl
If you just enter a starting point (or an end point) it will ONLY show the DIRECT (single hop) flights from that city.
It wouldn’t take that much work to combine all the timetables into a single map if people are interested.
October 6th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
I have recently been on the SAA flight from IAD to JNB. The flight leaving North America was nonstop. Upon our return, we stopped in Dakar, Senegal (DKR), for refueling and to pick up passengers. Not sure if this is common practice, or if they only do it when they have passengers to pick up/drop off.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
A delayed response, but thanks for this thread. It is particularly useful for using upgrades or planning quick trips. For instance, I wanted to use systemwide upgrades from United but didn’t want to go to Europe–it actually took work to figure out what our options were. (We picked Japan!) We’re also expecting our first kid and non-stop flights will be particularly key.
What I don’t understand is why the airlines don’t make the information available. Would it be that hard to add a user-defined route map?
March 18th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
http://nsflight.com
nsflight.com lists nonstop domestic destinations for US airports, and the number of flights per month. With routes always changing it is far from perfect. Hopefully it will still be a useful resource for travelers wishing to get a rough idea of where they can fly to nonstop.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
fare compare only works for NYC airports….nowhere else in the us…
February 16th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Sharon, please look closer at the original post. It reads:
So for flights from Boston, you would use
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/-BOS/city.html
San Francisco:
http://www.farecompare.com/flights/-SFO/city.html
etc.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:01 am
What about nonstops TO an airport? Right now I’m in Saudi Arabia looking for nonstops to Washington, DC. I can get to any airport in the region but I don’t know which ones offer nonstop service to DC. I had the same experience from Europe to North America last year. I knew where I wanted to go, but not where to start.
Thanks.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Johannesburg has direct nonstops to all the continents:
ATL (Atlanta)= North America
GRU (Sao Paolo Brazil)= South America
LHR (London) = Europe
PER (Perth) = Australia
HKG (Hong Kong) = Asia
JNB obviously flies to more than just these cities so I just chose a sampling of some of the biggest airports served. None of these flights have even re-fueling stops.
September 3rd, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I had a similar seach and found a web site that does this. Go to Skyscanner
Enter your from destination, the dates you are available to travel and in the “to” block, type “Everywhere” to get a list of all locations with to/from flights on the days requested. The list includes country name, Arilines an indirect flight cost and a direct flight cost if the costs are known. Most have question marks but, armed with destination and airline, its easy from there.
You can also type in a specific destination for a tradtional search.
I was flexible so I fiddled with departure and return dates until I found something that caught my interest.
June 19th, 2011 at 10:37 am
OAG tries, but it’s a bit misleading since it includes direct flights that aren’t nonstop:
http://www.oagtravel.com/Flight-Bytes/Where-Can-I-Fly-Direct
It’s not too hard to plug the results into matrix.itasoftware.com with the “n” option.