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'Time travel' flights take off in 2018 and land in 2017, due to time differences

A Hawaiian Airlines flight was among the 'time travelling' planes which took off in 2018 and landed in 2017 / Eric Salard/Wikimedia Commons

Time differences allowed passengers to celebrate the New Year twice

Aeroplanes were seemingly travelling back in time today, taking off in 2018 and landing in 2017, thanks to time differences around the globe.

Hawaiian Airlines flight HA446, from Auckland to Honolulu, was scheduled to take off at 11.55pm on New Year’s Eve, and land at 9.45am on the same day, due to the 23-hour time difference between the destinations.

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However, a delay saw it departing at five minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day, ready to land at 10.16am on 31 December.

The anomaly was noticed by US journalist Sam Sweeney on Twitter.

It wasn’t the only plane to travel back in time, however. Another Auckland flight Air New Zealand's NZ40, bound for Papeete, in French Polynesia, took off at 10.25am on 1 January, arriving at 4.25pm on 31 December.

Flightradar24, a Twitter account which tracks planes around the world, noted six aircraft departing Taipei in 2018, en route to land in the US and Canada in 2017.

 The Taipei flights included Eva Air to Vancouver, Seattle and Los Angeles, and China Airlines to San Francisco. All six landed safely in 2017. 

There is no word on how the passengers were received in the past.

Travelling back in time is possibly better than flying straight to HEL, as passengers on Finnair flight 666 did on Friday 13 October last year.

The Finnish national carrier retired flight number AY666 from Copenhagen (CPH) to Helsinki (HEL) shortly after its Friday 13th flight, renaming it AY954.

At the time, Finnair denied the number change had anything to do with superstition, telling The Independent: “We are a growing airline and we are reorganising our flight numbers to make room for additional flight numbers to be used.”