(CNN) — 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.”
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.
“Mele Kalikimaka” is the Hawaiian Christmas greeting made famous by Bing Crosby’s hit song of 1950.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
It will hopefully give Hawaii’s tourism-reliant economy a much-needed boost.
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.
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.
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
