Here’s a little holiday cheer: Hawaii is opening back up.
Hawaiian Airlines, the Aloha State’s flag carrier, announced Wednesday that it will resume its nonstop Boston and New York services in December, and the rest of its 13-city US mainland network too.
The airline only launched its 5,095-mile service between Honolulu and Boston’s Logan International Airport in April 2019, announcing at the time that it was “the longest regularly scheduled domestic route in US history.”
Using a wide-body Airbus A330, it takes about 10 hours to travel from Honolulu to Boston. The return flight takes about 11.5 hours.
For close to seven months, there has been mandatory quarantine for arrivals to Hawaii, but that changed on October 15 when the state introduced a pre-travel coronavirus testing program.
Travelers can now avoid the 14-day quarantine with proof of a negative Covid-19 state-approved test within 72 hours of the final leg of departure.
It will hopefully give Hawaii’s tourism-reliant economy a much-needed boost.
Back when the Boston service launched in the pre-Covid era, Hawaii Governor David Ige told CNN affiliate KITV, “We typically get more than 60,000 visitors from the greater Boston area,” he said. “So, it makes it even easier for those visitors to get to the islands.”
Boston flights will resume December 18, with Hawaiian offering two flights a week (at launch it was five, with plans to expand to six).
The Honolulu to New York JFK service will start again on December 14, with a three-times-a-week service, also on an Airbus A330.
The airline’s daily flights to Long Beach, California, will be back on December 13, allowing passengers to access Hawaiian’s full 13-city network on the US mainland.
“We’re pleased with increased demand for travel to Hawai’i, and we’re excited to once again offer our East Coast guests the convenience of our nonstop flights as we welcome them to the islands with new health and safety measures,” Brent Overbeek, senior vice president of revenue management and network planning at Hawaiian Airlines, said in a statement.
Hawaiian will also be using a narrow-body Airbus A321neo to bring back nonstop flights between Kaua’i’s Līhuʻe Airport and Los Angeles and Oakland, and between Maui’s Kahului Airport and San Diego and San Francisco.
The world’s longest flight is Singapore Airlines’ 18-hour schlep between Singapore and New York, which will also soon make its return on November 9.
An early victim of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s been on hold on March 23, but thanks to an airport switch from Newark, New Jersey, to New York JFK, it’s going to be even longer.
Singapore to JFK is a distance of 9,536.5 miles — 2.5 miles more than the already bum-numbing 9,534 miles to Newark.
David Williams and Kait Hanson contributed to this report
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