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.