Flight HA446 of Hawaiian Airlines was scheduled to take off on the night of December 31 from Auckland, New Zealand. But a ten-minute delay in departure meant the flight finally took off on 1st January 2018.
Surprisingly, when it landed in Honolulu, 8 hours later, it was still December 31 2017.
It's not so complicated and apparently very common.
It's no time travel but simply the presence of the international date line that the flight crossed while flying towards its destination. Because of the date line, Honolulu is 23 hours behind Auckland. Hence, the difference in dates (and one whole year in this case).
The anomaly was noticed by an American journalist which, even though quite common, amazed Twitter.
Because of an unexpected delay, Hawaiian Airlines flight 446 took off in 2018 and will land in 2017. #timetravelpic.twitter.com/A5vesXmjqq
— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) December 31, 2017
— Hawkeye Images (@webcentrick) December 31, 2017
That does sound like Lost. Glad I'm not on that flight.
— Greg Bussmann (@GregBussmann) December 31, 2017
Gotta wonder if the crew ran 10 extra minutes of diagnostic checks to make this happen.
— Matt DeCample (@DeCample) December 31, 2017
— Tom Molloy (@tmolloy_12) December 31, 2017
Thanks to the occurrence, the passengers would have celebrated New Year's twice.
Flight HA446 wasn't the only flight that time-travelled from 2018 to 2017. Six other flights from Taipei took off in 2018 and landed in 2017 when they arrived in North America.
6 aircraft just took off from Taipei in year 2018, to bring their passengers back to year 2017 in North America!#TimeTravelpic.twitter.com/pZYW8mQp03
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) December 31, 2017
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