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.