Update

Yes, for the very few of you who find your way here: I never updated as promised. I never scanned and uploaded the images from the early 1960s airline timetables I own.

The whole exercise just seemed so futile once the utter absurdity of the question of Obama's birthplace became even more obvious after he released his long-form birth certificate. The question always was absurd, of course, but it felt ever more icky even to be peripherally connected (by topic if not belief) to those who still thought Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii.

Also, summer happened, and I really didn't want to spend any of it scanning and uploading and writing copy. Perhaps now that autumn is here, I'll change my mind. But at any rate, if you find this blog and you still have even the slightest doubt that President Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii, I want the first thing you read on this website to be this:

YOU'RE A FREAK!

2011: the quickest route

Above is the itinerary (someday I'll learn to spell that word without using spellcheck) of almost the quickest route between Honolulu and Nairobi in 2011 that I could find. There was another option that was slightly quicker, with both directions taking under 29 hours, but the cost was $1,620 more than this routing, which didn't seem worth it to me. Let me know in the comments if you disagree, and I can post that other 2011 itinerary, which costs $7,020. (For the record, it's Honolulu-->Seoul-->Bangkok-->Nairobi and Nairobi-->Dubai-->Seoul-->Honolulu.)

The routing in the image above -- which, again, if you're working your way from most-recent to least-recent post, is from 2011, not 1961 -- costs $5,400 in 2011 dollars, and it's a westbound route from Hawaii. Outbound, it entails an eight-hour flight from Honolulu to Narita airport near Tokyo; a quick one-hour-and-10-minute layover at Narita; a six-and-a-half-hour flight from Narita to Bangkok; two hours in Bangkok; and a nine-and-a-half hour flight from Bangkok to Nairobi.

A traveler on this route had better hope that her first flight is not delayed, because she will need to get through customs and to her next gate at Narita in just 70 minutes.

Going back home, after the baby is born, our 2011 traveler flies from Nairobi to Dubai, a five-hour-and-15-minute trip. After five hours and 45 minutes in the Dubai airport, she flies to Seoul, Korea, on an eight-hour flight. After two hours and 25 minutes waiting in Seoul, she takes an eight-and-a-half hour flight to Honolulu.

And, still once more, this is what the trip between Honolulu and Nairobi is like, for comparison's sake, in 2011. Let's now peel back 50 years of jet-travel history and innovations, and take a look at what a Honolulu-to-Nairobi roundtrip would have entailed in 1961, the year President Obama was born.

2011: the least expensive route

Above is the image of the cheapest itinerary I could find for a date range in 2011 that I think mirrors a possible date range in 1961 in which Barack Obama (senior) and his new wife, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, might have traveled (had they traveled) between Hawaii and Kenya. I picked June 10th as my outbound date, because the University of Hawaii's spring semester might have been over by then, and October 1st as my return date, because, even though the fall semester would have already begun, it's unlikely airlines in 1961 would have allowed on a plane a woman with a baby younger than two months. (Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961.) Since I have never seen any specific evidence from a birther for a specific scenario in which the Obama family might have traveled to Kenya from Hawaii and back in 1961, I'm using my own dates. If someone wants to point me to a specific 1961 scenario with even the slightest reality-based background, I can adjust these dates accordingly, both for 2011 and, to the best of my ability, 1961.

Once more, this is not the shortest flight between the two cities available in 2011 for that date range (feel free to suggest another date range in the comments, based on evidence you have), but rather the least expensive flight one could book this year.

All right, all that being said, let's analyze it a little bit: the flight costs, this year, in 2011 U.S. dollars, $2,266.99. It entails a nine-hour-and-40-minute flight from Honolulu to Newark; a six-hour-and-45-minute layover in Newark; a seven-hour-and-30-minute flight to Brussels; a nearly three-hour layover in Brussels; an eight-hour-and-15-minute flight to Bujumbura, Burundi; and then a 90-minute flight to Nairobi.

The return flight involves an eight-hour flight from Nairobi to Zurich; a three-hour layover in Zurich; a hour-long flight from Zurich to Frankfurt; a three-and-a-half-hour layover in Frankfurt; an eleven-hour-plus flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco; almost three hours at SFO; and then a five-hour-and-40-minute flight to Honolulu.

Whew. Imagine taking that return flight with a two-month-old baby, future President of the United States or not!

Fortunately, as I mentioned, this is merely the least expensive flight between Hawaii and Kenya that I could find for mid-2011. You can also do this flight with one less stopover (two instead of three), but it will cost you a bit more. Let's look at another 2011 option in the next post, before we turn to 1961.

The shortest distance between two points

The image above is from Great Circle Mapper, showing the shortest nonstop flight route from Honolulu to Nairobi, Kenya: a distance of 10,736 miles.

However, there is not now, nor was there in 1961, a commercial airline that flies nonstop from Honolulu to Nairobi or anywhere else in Kenya. (In fact, even assuming there would be demand for such a nonstop pairing, no airplane in 2011 flies a nonstop route that long. Currently, Newark to Singapore, a distance of 9,535 miles, is the world's longest nonstop air route.)

Today in 2011, as was even more the case in 1961, most airlines, due to frequency and cost, factors that are ultimately a function of demand, would route a passenger going from Honolulu to Nairobi not by starting travel in a westbound direction (as shown above), but instead by traveling eastbound from Hawaii. Fortunately, as I mentioned, since Hawaii and Kenya are on opposite sides of the globe, even a hypothetical nonstop route isn't all that much longer when you go eastbound from Hawaii. But what really matters is the distance between the connection cities one must travel to in order to complete this trip in the real world.

In the next posts, I will show how Kayak.com (a website that looks at flight costs and routes from a great variety of online sources) routes travelers who want to take this trip today, in 2011, as well as lay out how long the trip takes today and how much it costs. The majority of these possible routes, including the least expensive routes, all of which require at least two stopovers, start by going east from Hawaii, but I will also include one quicker but more expensive route that goes west from Honolulu en route to Nairobi.

Timetables and other information I own

Airline schedules/route guides/maps I own (as of April 30, 2011):

1) American Airlines system map, 1961

2) BEA (British European Airways) "About Your Flight" brochure, with maps and information, from June 1961 or a bit later (no date given, but there is a reference to June 1961 on the back-cover map)

3) BOAC (British Overseas Airway Corporation) timetable, with routes/fares/information, effective August 1, 1962*

4) Nothwest Orient Airlines flight schedules, with fares and maps, September 24, 1961*

5) Pan Am Hawaiian Holiday brochure, with sample air fares from mainland cities to Honolulu, published in September 1960 for the 1961 calendar year

6) TDI (Transportation Displays, Inc.) combined schedules for all airlines flying into New York City-area airports, effective June 1 through June 30, 1961

7) TWA Air Routes in the United States map, showing TWA's domestic routes, and, in an inset, its international routes, 1961

8) United Air Lines flight timetable/route map/fare finder, effective July 1, 1961

And,

9) I also have a French-language Cunard Line ship schedule from February 1961, with a timetable and fares for Atlantic crossings between Europe and North America.

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* I realize that the entries marked with an asterisk were published post-Obama's birth (August 4, 1961). I'm limited both by what is available on eBay and my own discretionary income, so it is what it is. Even though it's a very good bet, in the rush of early Jet Age expansion, that timetables published in each successive year from 1961 will show more frequent and comprehensive air routes than existed in mid-1961, for now my research will have to rely on a leap of faith that any routes listed, say, in BOAC's August 1962 timetable, which is the one I happen to own, were also already in existence in mid-1961.

My goal: find out how difficult it was to travel from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961

Let me start first with my personal viewpoint: I am not a birther. I have not one single doubt that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, just as both forms of his birth certificate have stated. This blog does not exist to try and prove otherwise; instead, my raison d'etre is to look at early 1960s flight schedules I've purchased from eBay in order to do my best to determine the duration and cost of traveling from Honolulu to Nairobi, Kenya in 1961, the year of Obama's birth.

My intention is to be transparent about exactly which airline schedules and bits of information I possess (and which I don't), and to use those schedules to reconstruct a typical trip from Hawaii to Kenya, two places nearly literally on the opposite sides of the world from each other. (Honolulu's precise antipode is in Botswana. Click the "Antipode" link on the bottom-left of this page.) I'll also include some bits of readily available information about the Obama family in 1961, to ask questions like: would an 18-year-old pregnant American girl undertake a very long and expensive trip to Kenya to meet her new husband's other wife, neither of whom knows the other exists? Who would have been served by such a trip?

If any birther conspiracy theorists read this, I don't expect to change their minds (nothing can, really), and nor do I mean to suggest that it was impossible to get from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961. Of course it wasn't impossible: President Obama's Kenyan father made the same trip, in order to attend the University of Hawaii. I only want to interject a bit of humdrum realism into the discussion and discover for myself what it entailed to get from one place to the other at the dawning of the Jet Age. The other bonus for me is that I get to work my airline-nerd side and go deeply into schedule arcana and maps and plane types and all the rest. So let's get started.....