Trying to have an all-daylight flight?

[HighBypass 2,339]

..Or perhaps an all-night flight for that matter?

I was trying to figure out if I could conduct a long distance flight so that I at least take off and land in daylight (ignoring real life scheduling). My specific trip in the sim is Perth Australia to Cape Town South Africa - over 5000 nm.

There's a handy little site called sunflight.net which shows you graphically with terminators whether you're flying in daylight or at night. You have a slider which you can move which shows the progress of your flight as the earth rotates, moving the terminators and sun positions as you go.

You input the departure and arrival airports (IATA 3-letter codes) and the date & time of the departure, along with the estimated flight time (it defaults to 8 hours). A compromise is that the "flight" is measured along the great circle.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

When it is near the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere the Europe to North America flights or North America to Asia flights tend to be all daylight the entire time depending on your departure time. A lot of those flights end up close to the arctic where it is 24 daylight and you are chasing the sun

Winter would be the opposite being night the entire way

[fluffyflops 1,846]

Errhhh from Europe to the USA??? 

 

[MaDDogz 242]

Little nav map has this feature.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

My flight from Heathrow to Phoenix going home was all daylight, we took off in the early afternoon and landed in the dusky shadows of late afternoon, making you "feel" like you've only flown a few hours until you crash on your bed realizing your body was in a low oxygen, low pressure environment for eleven hours, and you sleep like a turtle for three days, lol.... 

That's how my SFO Narita flight was as well in '92, which actually was a flight from Orlando to Narita via SFO ending up in Guam and back to Tokyo and SFO in a little less than eleven days, which still messed with my sleep system quite well for the business appointment I was trying to catch, if I know I need sleep I say "forget business" sleep sleep sleep lol 

East to West flights are always harder, I remember what my first tour guide, Jim Jackson, told me when I was on my first European trip at age 15 in '77.  He told us and all the other high school US and Canadian Emissaries that we could sleep when we landed back in the States. 

That first trip was seven days of fun---Milan-Luzern-Luzern-Innsbruck-Innsbruck-Munich-Munich which began when we landed in Europe on Palm Sunday in '77 and ended when we left Europe on Easter Sunday from Munich.  But man was I tired, and they let us fifteen-seventeen year olds drink beer on the Transinternational DC8-63 that had to leave on Easter from Munich, pick up some stragglers in Vienna, then go backwards stopping in Shannon Ireland, and Gander Newfoundland, finally to JFK.

And I saw Boston lighting up not long before we landed, as the sun was dipping below the horizon.  Passing Boston for some reason, and working there doing some teaching near Harvard, gave me so much euphoria, even though my teaching term was just for a special week with a good friend named Scott "Beam me up Scottie"...

My first Europe trip in '77 ended when I connected on an American 707 out of JFK, then on to SFO via Dallas in a 727.  My father made me go to school-- my geometry teacher sent me home, because I fell fast asleep on my desk in class like a monk who had been studying the Bible for too long--lol.  I was out of school for a week, the energy I expended to embrace the Italian and German speaking areas of Europe, to show off the two languages I knew, exhausted me and all I heard was a tower of babel in my head for a week, as my head was engorged with all the accents, and beautiful dialects I heard in that part of the world...

John

[jon b 2,041]

The worst flights I used to do were London to New York taking off late afternoon in autumn. You’d have the sun set right in your eyes for a whole 6 hours

[Ray Proudfoot 8,927]

If you have Concorde you could try something only that aircraft * is capable of.

Depart Heathrow 30 mins after sunset. Once you reach Mach 2 south of Ireland you are effectively going faster than the sun moves across the sky. Around mid-Atlantic you’ll see the sun rise in the west. No other passenger aircraft can manage that. I intend to try it once FSL release the 64-bit Concorde.

* I know there are some military aircraft capable of Mach 2 but champagne isn’t served so they’re excluded. 😁

[Captain Kevin 586]

18 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

If you have Concorde you could try something only that aircraft * is capable of.

Depart Heathrow 30 mins after sunset. Once you reach Mach 2 south of Ireland you are effectively going faster than the sun moves across the sky. Around mid-Atlantic you’ll see the sun rise in the west. No other passenger aircraft can manage that. I intend to try it once FSL release the 64-bit Concorde.

* I know there are some military aircraft capable of Mach 2 but champagne isn’t served so they’re excluded. 😁

Or if you're bored and want to attempt some time travel, depart Heathrow after 00:00 AM (we'll assume an exemption has been made for this flight regarding night curfew), fly at Mach 2, and land at JFK the day before you took off.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,927]

6 minutes ago, Captain Kevin said:

Or if you're bored and want to attempt some time travel, depart Heathrow after 00:00 AM (we'll assume an exemption has been made for this flight regarding night curfew), fly at Mach 2, and land at JFK the day before you took off.

You don’t need Concorde for time travel. Jump in any aircraft and locate yourself on a Pacific island just to the west of the International Date Line. Then fly eastwards to another island on the other side of it.

You can enjoy the same day all over again. 😁 But fly the opposite direction and you lose a day .... forever! 😫