Around the world - Hong Kong, Singapore, Chennai, Muscat and home

About Frank · About IT · Ravenel Bridge · Unbuilding Bridges · Photo Essays · Forgetting

Around the World: Hong Kong, Singapore and ...

It all started in Charleston, the day after Thanksgiving. We left Charleston about 6am for Chicago - then took the noon United flight (UA 895) for 15 hours - over the north pole. Note the GPS tracks - we passed within 60 miles of the north pole and crossed 13 time zones in about 20 min. We then flew south over Siberia, through Mongolia and China and into Hong Kong. We learned a new way to measure the duration of a flight - by the number of movies. This was a 6 movie flight. The flights continued to Singapore, then Chennai, then Bahrain, then Muscat, then Dubai, then Frankfurt, then Dulles (Washington) and finally home. The surprise - the total distance was 23,357 miles - something less than 25,000 that I expected from my early education. The total flight time was 47 hours 58 min.

Flight with Routes highlighted

The GPS-predicted flight path - great circle routes

Flight tracks

The GPS tracks, acquired while balancing the GPS with one hand in the window (try getting window seats for each segment of an around the world flight - United Airlines did us right!!!).

Right click and "Save Link Target As" to download the Garmin GPS tracks

Flight from Chennai to Bahrain to Muscat

This was a very interesting flight (GF 069) - We call it our miricle day. Five hours late leaving Madras - due to fog at the Chennai airport, we reached Bahrain 5 hours late, approximately 2:30 pm - thus experiencing a virtual miss - the connecting flight for Muscat was scheduled to depart about 11am. When we arrived in Bahrain at about 14:30, Gulf Air and effenciently changed our Muscat flight from an 11am flight to a 9 pm flight. But, our original connecting flight, GF 064, was also 5 hours late arriving from Bangladesh. We noticed on the departure monitor that our flight; GF 064 was scheduled to depart at 15:30. So we went to the gate and Gulf Air worked a miracle: they found our checked luggage, and put us on our original flight. Thus, in this case, a virtual miss did not translate into a real miss. We arrived not 12 hours late - but only 5 hours late - quite a miracle!

Click for trip segment:

Flight tracks

Flight from Chennai to Bahrain to Muscat

To Hong Kong

To Singapore

On to India - and IITM (Intian Institute of Technolgy - Madras)

To Oman