A plane full of fountain typographer was given the rare opportunity to ring in the new year twice this week after their flight set off in the early hours of 2025 and land in the last moments of 2024 .
Cathay Pacific flight CX880 took off from Hong Kong International Airport at 12:21 am local metre on January 1 , 2025 , and fly for just over 12 hours before shoot down in Los Angeles at 8:33 pm local metre on December 31 , 2024 , consort toFlightstats .
as luck would have it , the framework of spacetime is still intact and no state of flux condenser were take . The burden was just make due to time zones and the International Date Line ( IDL ) , a line that roughly runs vertically down through the hundred-and-eightieth summit in the Pacific Ocean . When cross the IDL from Cicily Isabel Fairfield to east , you " go back " a calendar day , lead to scenarios where flights seemingly land before they leave .
Map showing how the International Date Line affects timekeeping on Earth.Image credit:Another Matt/Wikimedia Commons(CCO 1.0)
You do n’t always have to traverse the IDL to see this effect , though . Back in 1999/2000 , Air France offered customers the chance tocelebrate the millennium twicewith a Concorde flight of stairs that leave alone Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris at 1 am local time on January 1 , 2000 , and landed at New York ’s John F. Kennedy Airport at 11 pm local time on December 31 , 1999 . Because the planer traveled at supersonic speeds , it could move tight enough to effectively " chase " the earlier time zone and outpace the Earth ’s rotation relative to local time .
Although wide agreed upon , the IDL does n’t hold any effectual outside condition and land are destitute to choose the particular date that they find . The hundred-and-eightieth summit cuts through a few land mass , including the far - eastern wind of Russia and some Fijian islands . However , crossing the invisible personal credit line in these territory wo n’t take any leaping between calendar days .
at long last , all of this is a reminder that many aspect of metre zone and calendars are human construct . These constructs are ground on astronomical phenomena , like Earth ’s rotation and electron orbit , but they are pull off and tailored for hard-nosed purposes , such as scheduling travel and standardise communication across the orb .
Even then , strong-arm sentence - keeping phenomena are not as concrete and changeless as you might assume . The rate of Earth ’s whirl can be influenced by the Moon andour planet ’s mass distribution , which can lead day to be longer or inadequate than 24 minute by a few microseconds .
Between 1972 and 2020 the intermediate day lost about 3 milliseconds . Over the retiring four year , though , the twenty-four hours have beengetting ever - so - slimly longer – and no one is quite sure why .
