I beg to differ. The route is irrelevant.
The big deal is that it is a twin engine aircraft and it flew for so long and so far. There are different flight rules for twin and four-engine aircraft. Twins must stay within a certain distance, en route, of an emergency landing site should an engine fail. This is a push to qualify twin engine aircraft to be certified to fly the more expensive four engine routes. Four engine ac's being more costly to acquire, maintain and fuel.
I know all about twin engine etops, my airline just passed certification with their 757's about 2 weeks ago. We start Honolulu and Maui service in December, and we shaved about an hour off our Cancun flights.
Lots of pool work by the flight attendants.
Oh, really!! That would mean, if they were successful in getting this regulatory restriction waived or lifted altogether, that their twin-engine airliners could compete directly with those Airbus 4-engine A-340's and A-380's, which would give the Airbus-driving airlines (Air France, Lufthansa) an instantaneous and severe migraine.
It would also vitiate one of the premises the Airbus 4-engine designs had been built on, and gut one of the main reasons for stepping up to an A-380. It would also tend to prompt a lot of trade-ins of older 747's.
This is a very significant piece of gut-fighting by Boeing. And a major screw job for Airbus if Boeing succeeds in getting over on regulatory. Now the frogs will be spreading the brown-bag money around in earnest!!