This subject reminds me of a missed approach last year at MEL (Melbourne, Australia, not Florida!) where I was a PAX on a 744 flight from Singpaore. The aircraft actually conducted 2x missed approaches, pulling up both times at about 150 feet due to bad runway visibility.
After circling for 30 mins we diverted to ADL (Adelaide), which took another hour's flying time. It was during this long detour that the sparcity of the Australian continent really came home to me, in that the nearest civilian airport capable of handling 744 operations was 450 miles/720km away.
One of the downsides of this is the amount of reserve fuel that must be carried on such flights. When the A340-400 LR was being designed, the marketing people showed it had the range to fly Europe-Australia non-stop. However, they didn't factor in the need for additional reserve fuel needed due to distances between large airports, and this is why London/Australia for me is still a minimum one stop flight.