Boston to Beijing - Flying

Boston to Beijing - Non-stop The trip to the deepest part of China, the northern Silk Road, begins with a flight from Boston to Beijing.   Non-stop it is fifteen hour fifteen minutes flying 6,728 miles, 10,820 kilometers if you prefer the metric system and like the bigger number. The Silk Road, even stretching it a bit from Rome to Beijing is only 5,045 miles, 8,120 Kms for those starting out from the Euro side. We can be sure the original Silk Road travelers took a year to travers a shorter distance than we cover in a bit more than a half a day.

Hainan Airlines offers this non-stop opportunity. More than time saved, we depart late afternoon and arrive the next day early evening. Adding the fifteen hour flight with the twelve hours, 12 time zones, that Beijing is ahead of the East Coast of the US, we get a twenty seven hour time difference between leaving and arriving at our destination. Science aside, leaving later, having dinner and sleeping in a normal cycle eases the change of time zones for me. Agreed that Hainan is a Chinese carrier and some loyalty is owed to US carriers, but the US carriers all have a stop and the trip extends four or five hours longer.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner our camel of the sky has a rated distance of 7,355 or 7,635 miles, depending on the model.   But it is not a small sipper. With a capacity of 33,340 or 33,384 gal, also depending on the model, they are not taking small sips of fuel. They are consuming about 1800 gal per hour. This does depend on number of passengers and their luggage. The less weight the less consumption. Flying northerly over Siberia and over the Pacific, is there a better reason to pack light to help stretch the fuel. My little contribution.

Beijing and Boston are nearly the same latitude, distance from the equator. Boston is a bit further north, about 144 miles further from the equator than Beijing. If we were to fly directly along the latitude, the distance is about 7200 miles. Flying northward towards the pole where the sphere of the earth is smaller, remember at the North Pole the earth is at a point, we can fly a shorter distance westward.

I’ve packed my usual for the flight. Two months of past issues of The Economists which I have yet to read, last Sunday’s New York Times and six paperback books. They are usually the classics that I probably would not read normally but confined to the cabin I plough through one or two each flight. All the magazines and papers are left behind, expanding my brain and lightening my load.