You are very mistaken. Thailand is 30 minutes ahead of neighboring Burma. Oddest of all may be Nepal, which is 15 minutes ahead neighboring India (some say this is to emphasize its independence from its large neighbor) and 1 hour, 15 minutes behind Thailand.
I have taken the Wellington/Sydney flight on several occasions when the time difference has been three hours, which is pretty much equal to the length of the flight. So a 4.00pm departure from Wellington results in a 4.00pm arrival in Sydney.
What about the flight that arrives the longest before it takes off?
I’m guessing it would be between two islands close to the date line - probably Samoa (UTC +13) to American Samoa (UTC-11), since Samoa shifted the date line last year.
In summer, Samoa observes daylight saving time, at UTC+14, so it is 25 hours ahead of American Samoa. The flight time between the two appears to be 35 minutes, so you’d arrive 24 hours 25 minutes before you left.
Polynesian flies this route, e.g:
So you arrive 23 hours 25 minutes before you leave (currently it is winter in Samoa, so now DST). The booking engine doesn’t seem to extend to the southern summer months at the moment.
In theory, in the southern summer you could land two calendar days before you left, if there were flights close after midnight, e.g.
Depart Fagalii November 27, 00.10 hours, arrive Pago Pago November 25, 23:45 hours!
Samoa is only ~14°S. Why on Earth would they need to have DST? I found a page which talks about their 2009 law to adopt DST which lists the usual reasons a country far from the equator would do DST, but 14°? Does anyone really notice the change in daylight?
The Big Island is 19°N and Hawaii doesn’t observe DST.
At least American Samoa doesn’t bother.
Flights from Helsinki to Stockholm pass over one timezone (UTC+2 to UTC+1, in DST it’s UTC+3 to UTC+2) and take about one hour, so they are often scheduled to arrive exactly the same time they leave. Examples include the 8:00 am, 9:30 am, 4:00 pm and 5:55 pm flights, among others.
I guess there are a lot of examples of this in cases where the distance between two airports on neighboring timezones or even further away matches just correctly, and you are flying from an earlier timezone to a later one.
“What if it was on a Friday during Daylight Savings Time in a leap year, Fadder…?”
I once flew from Sydney, AUS, stopped for about 1.5 hours for fuel in Honolulu, HI, then flew to Los Angeles, CA, where we landed over an hour before we had left Sydney.
Also on that trip, I lost a Saturday when I left, and gained a Monday on the return leg. (above) That is screwed up, and I have felt gypped ever since.
London-Paris, c. one hour flight, Paris one hour ahead.
I was wondering the same thing. Bragging rights to have the earliest time zone, I suppose (although even with the extra hour it ties with Kiribati and Tokelau on that score).