Author: Alex Davies / Source: WIRED
Most of the time, passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 800, flying from Panama City to Istanbul, can look down on Puerto Rico just after takeoff, then the blue of the Atlantic Ocean for a few hours, then Southern France and Northern Italy before arcing south over Greece and touching down.
But those who made the trip on Sunday got a view of a very different set of locales: Cuba, then the eastern coast of the United States and the southern tips of Greenland and Norway, finally reaching the Turkish city by way of Poland and Romania.Compared to the “great circle distance” between the two airports (meaning the shortest path) of 6,739 miles, Flight 800 traveled 7,553 miles, according to aviation tracking site FlightRadar24. That’s an extra 814 miles. And while it takes two and a half hours to fly the same distance from New York City to Jacksonville, Florida, the Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 took just 27 minutes longer than average, landing just 11 minutes after its scheduled arrival time, per FlightStats.com. By airline standards, that counts as officially on time.
Bananas, right? Not so much.
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