I don’t know how it was that I became the town crier for “longest scheduled nonstop commercial flight in the world”, but it feel as if I have gone there.

OK, I do know how it happened: Airlines where I live, in the UAE, began making nonstop flights from Abu Dhabi or Dubai to Los Angeles, which is a really long flight. One of the longest in the aviation world, and I mentioned that a bit over a year ago.

The Etihad flight we took back then was the third-longest at the time (and at this moment) behind a Qantas flight from Sydney to Dallas (and vice versa) and Delta going from Atlanta to Cape Town South Africa.

And now it seems like some sort of global race for “longest flight” in under way.

Only two months ago, Emirates, the Dubai airline, announced a nonstop from Dubai to Panama City. And once you got past the “there’s interest in flying that route?!?” issues … you saw that, yes, at 17 hours and 30 minutes it would become the longest flight in civil aviation.

But now, another airline is aiming to have a flight longer than Dubai-to-Panama City — and has announced it even before Emirates has begun service to Panama City.

This one would be a return of a flight from Singapore to New York, which would eclipse the Emirates flight — which hasn’t actually started yet.

Singapore to New York, on Singapore Airlines, could last up to 19 (!) hours. Inside a metal tube, with no escape.

It would be made possible by a variant of a new Airbus model, the “ultra-long-range” A350.

It seems fairly clear that the idea of enormously long plane rides, made possible by light, fuel-efficient airlines, has become a competitive thing. “Longest flight” is something more than a few airlines would like to boast.

What we wonder now is … what route might be longer than the “maybe in 2018” Singapore-NYC trip — but still be commercially viable?

Anyone willing to fly Cape Town to Los Angeles? That’s just short of 10,000 miles (and 20 hours, at the least). But then you can just take the same starting point and work your way up the Pacific Coast. To San Francisco (10,237 miles) and maybe even to Anchorage (10,474 miles).

It gets hard to invent flights much longer than that but, at the moment, it seems that airline executives and builders of passenger planes are busy working at it.