Gaining time when flying west (why not always fly west when practical?)

Wel, you don’t “gain” time, you just have more time on the ground. And you are still tired from flying in a cramped plane with artifical atmosphere and exposure to everyone’s respiratory viruses.

Some airlines would charge you less for around-the-world flights. But there really are not that many “pairs” of cities. From California, opposite side cities are in Iraq/Iran/ U.A.E., and rural parts of the former Soviet Union,

I have a friend who flew from San Francisco to New Delhi via Dubai because she got a deal on an Emirates flight. Most people would make that trek through Singapore.

But to really gain time, one must fly East! over the international date line.

I once left Hong Kong at 9 a.m., flew through Tokyo, then on to San Francisco, and landed at 7 a.m. the same morning!

Gaining time that way only helps specific people in really specific ways, since it’s not time dilation but just when the sun will be up or down, or how much time one experiences with it being called a particular date where they are.

So, that helps people who get certain types of jetlag, but there are also people who get less jetlag the other way, or who don’t get jetlag or always get jetlag.

And it might help someone who has some legal/business reason to want to be active on a certain official date for longer… maybe to win a contest or something if it strangely didn’t define it’s time limits in a specific time zone.

Otherwise, it’s not much of an advantage that I can think of.

For someone who is really sensitive to jetlag in a particular direction, it might make sense to do what you suggest, but only if they had useful places for them to be arranged around the world, which it seems to me is probably a really rare circumstance, but it might apply to some people who work for international corporations.

You loose time when you go home (East).

A classical recommendation for going East – Phineas Fogg won his wager by going East, but would have lost if he had gone West.

@zenvelo Nice! Though we don’t know if he would have won, or if it would even have been possible, because he was using a hot air balloon, which relies on wind, so his route and resulting adventures would have been entirely different.

Thank you zenvelo – clearly I need to understand the date line better