Doesn’t fit the OP’s query, but an interesting flight experience nonetheless…
McGuire AFB to Eielson AFB (Fairbanks, AK) in June, positioning to drag a NATO partner’s fighters back to Europe after that year’s Red Flag-Alaska exercise had concluded. We took off late afternoon from McGuire, and landed 10pm local in Eielson. The sun was low in the sky, but never truly set.
I hadn’t considered the time spent taxiing on the ground, or flying above the arctic circle. Let me clarify.
As LSLGuy pointed out, basically we’re talking about local solar time, not clock time (and let’s avoid discussing mean solar time also). Suppose you have an app on your smartphone which calculates local solar time for wherever you happen to be at that instant. Simply put, if the sun is directly above your longitude line, then the app says 12:00 noon. This would be true even if the sun isn’t visible from your location (e.g. when you’re inside the arctic circle on December 22nd – despite the fact that you are in total darkness, there’s still a specific longitude line you’re standing on, and your solar time is the same as all the other people who are standing on that same longitude line).
So, I’m looking for commercial flights where…
[a] at some point in the flight, your “local solar time” app would show time running backwards, because you are crossing longitude lines faster than the sun is crossing them.
** the local solar time at arrival is earlier than the local solar time at departure.
Clearly, [a] is a necessary condition of ** (assuming that distance over time is a continuous function :-P)
Ideally, I’d like to see a flight where arrival at the airport gate is earlier than departure from the airport gate, so solar time went backwards even including time spent taxiing, taking off, and landing. For example, the plane pushes back from the gate at 10:15 am, local clock time, when my “local solar time” app says 10:13. We taxi, take off, climb to 10,000 feet, and I see my app says 10:24. Then I watch, amazed, as the app starts running backwards. 10:23. 10:22. 10:21. By the time we are descending at the destination, my app says 10:04. We touch down at 10:07 and taxi to the gate at 10:11 (where the clock in the airport says 9:47 am). Keeping time by the sun, I have arrived 4 minutes before I left.
But I’d settle for one where the destination airport is “d” degrees of longitude west from the departure airport, and the plane flies from one to the other in less than 4d minutes, not counting time spent taxiing, taking off, and landing.
That one looks promising, but to be certain we need to know what’s the offsets between clock time and local solar time at Reykjavik and at Anchorage. The shape of the time zones might be skewing the answer. Alternatively, we can figure it based on their longitudes. RKV is 21.9466 W (according to Google) and ANC is 149.9901 W, so that’s a difference of 128.0435 degrees, which the sun will usually traverse in 8 hours and 32 minutes. The scheduled flight time is 6 hours 50 minutes, so yes we have a winner!
FYI, flightaware.com says that this flight usually takes longer than the schedule says, between 7 and 8 hours. But that’s still faster than the sun.
FWIW, Icelandair Flight 679 appears to arrive 50 minutes before it left, but it’s actually 1 hour and 42 minutes because of time zone shapes and daylight saving time (Anchorage uses DST but Reykjavik doesn’t).