Flight to India
I'm taking the longest non-stop flight of my life to get to Delhi: American flight #292, Chicago O'Hare to Delhi, India. 14.5 hours of non-stop flying goodness.
Luckily, my super-Gold American Airlines status allowed me to get an exit row seat - which was an added bonus, since i sure do like to stretch when i sleep.
Before I left my friends and I had long discussions on whether the flight would be over Pacific or Atlantic ocean - most thought Pacific. The flight route turned out a lot cooler. We keep forgetting that the world is not a flat map, but a round globe - so instead of flying in a "straight line" from Chicago over Atlantic through Mediterranean to India like you'd imagine by looking on a map, we instead flew essentially up-and-0ver Greenland, over the White Sea, Sweden, Estonia, Russia and then end up in India:
Naturally, the shortest distance between 2 points is still a line, but on a globe it's not that straight. I, of course, expected to just fly over the Atlantic, maybe Africa, and on to India. I always forget the world isn't really flat.
Flying over Sweden was awesome - it was dawn, and i could see all the snow-and-ice covered land below jutting out into the ocean. Really majestic. Not sure if these were true fjords, but very pretty.
Then we flew over Baltic Sea and between Riga and Tallinn. I'll admit I almost teared up, since my hometown Minsk was only about 200km south but I didn't get to see it. We then continued over more of my "motherland" by flying over Russia - which looked pretty snowed-in and cold.
Still, it was a little weird to see the names of all the long-forgotten Russian/Central Asian towns light up on the flight map, names I haven't thought about in years.
At some point I fell asleep, and woke up when approaching Delhi. The crazy thing there was that I looked at the flight map on the screen and realized that about an hour prior we flew right over Kabul! Would've been interesting to see that, but oh well.
Luckily, my super-Gold American Airlines status allowed me to get an exit row seat - which was an added bonus, since i sure do like to stretch when i sleep.
Before I left my friends and I had long discussions on whether the flight would be over Pacific or Atlantic ocean - most thought Pacific. The flight route turned out a lot cooler. We keep forgetting that the world is not a flat map, but a round globe - so instead of flying in a "straight line" from Chicago over Atlantic through Mediterranean to India like you'd imagine by looking on a map, we instead flew essentially up-and-0ver Greenland, over the White Sea, Sweden, Estonia, Russia and then end up in India:
Naturally, the shortest distance between 2 points is still a line, but on a globe it's not that straight. I, of course, expected to just fly over the Atlantic, maybe Africa, and on to India. I always forget the world isn't really flat.
Flying over Sweden was awesome - it was dawn, and i could see all the snow-and-ice covered land below jutting out into the ocean. Really majestic. Not sure if these were true fjords, but very pretty.
Then we flew over Baltic Sea and between Riga and Tallinn. I'll admit I almost teared up, since my hometown Minsk was only about 200km south but I didn't get to see it. We then continued over more of my "motherland" by flying over Russia - which looked pretty snowed-in and cold.
Still, it was a little weird to see the names of all the long-forgotten Russian/Central Asian towns light up on the flight map, names I haven't thought about in years.
At some point I fell asleep, and woke up when approaching Delhi. The crazy thing there was that I looked at the flight map on the screen and realized that about an hour prior we flew right over Kabul! Would've been interesting to see that, but oh well.
Labels: India
posted by toli at 4:18 PM
2 Comments:
Amazing blog!! Thanks for sharing wonderful post. I was looking for cheap flights from Chicago to Delhi. And I found here informative travel blog. Keep posting!!
Amazing blog!! Thanks for sharing wonderful post. I was looking for cheap flights from Chicago to Delhi. And I found here informative travel blog. Keep posting!!
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