LAX to Taipei or Seoul, S. Korea are about the same time: 14 hours. Coming back from Korea, our 747 was doing 550 MPH with a 196-210 MPH tail wind. We caught the jet stream and our ground speed was 750 MPH. I was telling people that, relative to the ground, we were going over Mach 1. The return trip was “only” 10 hours. Pretty nice, I’m always happy to shave 4 hours off that flight. 14 hours in a plane is just ghastly. It’s hard to describe the great feeling of coming back through American Customs.
“14 hours in a plane is just ghastly.”
Correct. But try my experience of a 12-hour delay at Chiang Kai Shek in Taiwan in 2010. I was so darn bored I made it a “personal contest” to get the names and phone numbers of the desk clerks at the terminal. Eventually, a talkative dude in the same flight as I am was a money manager for a brokerage firm in Hong Kong and gave me stock tips..actually trading info on which stocks to buy. He wasn’t supposed to say these stuff but he was just the type who wanted to make time fly by. I learned more about the stock market in a Taiwanese terminal than watching CNBC.