That was the point when we started down the runway in Kinshasa to the point we landed in Brazzaville. The plane headed out over the Atlantic, climbed to about 25,000 feet, then looped back to land. I suppose government aviation authority designed the flight path to avoid other traffic, civilian and military.
Back in the 70’s, I used to travel back and forth to Hickory, NC to work with a client there.
On one flight, the last leg of the trip was from Charlotte to Hickory in a small 6-seater prop plane. Luggage had to be loaded into the plane before people could enter the back row; the rest had to wait until all of the seats were full before being loaded… The last person aboard was told by the pilot, “See those pedals on the floor? Don’t touch them!”
Part of the seatbelt for the person in front of me was hanging above and behind the seat. I noticed that that part of the belt was permanently curled up – it looked more like a rope than a belt. When the plane started shaking, I grabbed it, and it was a perfect fit!
The plane was pitching and rolling, and we hadn’t even taken off, yet. That was the most scared I’d ever been on a commercial flight.
During the period when the Cuba flight window opened in 2010-12 you could take AA-Eagle from here to there.
My smallest commercial flight: Cape Air, Cessna 402; shortest flight 72 miles SJU-STT.
Punta Islita, Costa Rica to Nosara, Costa Rica (distance about 37 miles) on Nature Air earlier this year. On loved the trip and the airline. They just make a big loop around Costa Rica and stop at a lot a tiny airstrips along the way so you take off and land several times on a single trip and it is beautiful.
The shortest trip on a large airliner is St. Thomas to St. Croix USVI (also about 37 miles). You can take a full sized airliner to St. Croix from the US mainland but they usually stop in St. Thomas first to let off the larger group of passengers. When you take off from St. Thomas, you almost immediately begin the approach into St. Croix.
Charted a tiny plane from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to the North Rim. About 50 miles or less by air. We landed in a grass meadow. Hiked back over three days to the South Rim where my car was.
I was flown to the starting point of a river rafting trip on the Green River in Utah in a 2- or 3- passenger plane. The pilot sat hunched in the front like a little old lady crouched over the steering wheel of her oversized car. The plane was VERY sensitive to updrafts as we crossed canyons. We landed on a bush-strewn plain (not a prepared landing strip).
It was a pretty short flight, too. Well under an hour.
But once we got there, the only way out was down the river.
Malmö, Sweden to Copenhagen, Denmark. 25 or 30 miles, in a little twin-prop plane with a few dozen seats in it. The flight was very brief, but we were still served drinks.
Shortest flight was between Vancouver BC and Victoria BC. Took between ten and fifteen minutes.
Smallest commercial aircraft has been a Beechcraft 1900D–I’ve taken a number of flights on those. The 1900D seats 19 passengers, and if you sit close enough to the front, you can read the instrument panel.
Shortest,either Boston, MA to Portland, ME or Chattanooga, TN to Atlanta, GA.
CHA-ATL is about 115 miles, and about a 20 minute flight.
BOS-PWM is about 107 miles, and about the same.
The BOS-PWM flight would also have been the smallest plane. It was a propeller plane, seated maybe 12-15 people and the landing gear didn’t pull up into the plane. They also had to move people around between seats to balance things better before we took off.
Port Angeles, WA to Seattle. I think the trip was about 30 minutes, and the plane was very small - like a large van - sat 8-10 people, I think. We all had to be weighed by the pilot before we boarded, and he sat us according to weight, as well as weight of the luggage.
Beautiful flight, I might add - was mid-summer, warm, and very clear - really nice view of Mt Baker and the nortern Cascades, as well as Mt Rainier. Approach was also interesting as I got to look over the pilot’s shoulder. It took me a few seconds to realize the large numbers in front of us was the end of the runway. It’s not often you get to see out the front of a commercial aircraft while it’s landing.
Horizon Air ran the flight, and I dont think they fly from PA any longer.
Same flight, took a 9 or 11 seat beechcraft taxi from Denver to Colorado Springs,60 Mi, as last hop(well on the way out too, but that was a 19 seater).
It was kind of stupid since I lived in Denver, and got off the plane, and drove back to my house.
But first I lived in south Denver so it was really only about 45 miles vs 15 to the Denver airport.
And the Airport fees( parking fees ) at COS made it much cheaper to get the extra flight down and drive back.
I’ve carried people in a 727 between Freeport & Nassau in the Bahamas. That’s 131 statute miles. The lowest number of passengers I’ve carried on that route is 1.
I’ve flown Milwaukee to O’Hare a bunch; usually due to diverting to MKE while trying to get into ORD. That’s 67 miles. And yes, I have had folks get off in MKE, rent a car, and drive to ORD, getting there before we eventually did.
The smallest commercial aircraft I’ve ridden on is a DeHavilland Beaver - 6 seats total counting the pilot. de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver - Wikipedia
When did that flight take place?
When I was a kid, I once flew from one of the SF Bay Area airports (I think SFO, but it might have been Oakland) to Sacramento, around 90 miles or so. We had a strong tailwind, and the flight lasted less than 20 minutes.
I think the smallest plane I’ve flown on is a Canadair Regional Jet CRJ200, which has a seating capacity of 50, on more than one occasion between Sacramento and Salt Lake City.
My shortest flight was from Port of Spain, Trinidad to Scarborough, Tobago. POS to TAB is 50 miles. You have to get high enough to clear the mountains north of POS and then you get ready for landing!
Smallest was probably a rather mundane CRJ.
I was living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC and flew to visit my parents in the suburbs of Oakland, California. My flight was Washington -> Atlanta -> New Orleans -> Shreveport -> Dallas -> San Jose -> Oakland.
The smallest plane was a flight from Dallas to Wichita Falls, Texas which was so small, the luggage was put in storage spaces in the wings and it had to be weighed to balance the wings. We barely got above the trees. But I have no idea what kind of plane it was.
Ooh, airsick, much?
I’ve never been airsick, but just looking at this makes me wonder if it wouldn’t happen to me on that plane. Probably the smallest plane of any kind I’ve ever been in was a four-seater Piper, on the occasion of an air tour of the Grand Canyon. While that was obviously much smaller than the Fairchild, it lacked the latter’s grim narrow tube feel.
The smallest commercial transport plane I’ve been in was probably a B737 or DC9. I’ve never seen the inside of any airliner that wasn’t a jet, despite more puddle-jump flights than I can remember to count. Even at my age (56), I can’t remember ever being at LAX or even Burbank (now Bob Hope) and seeing anything but jets. They must have driven the props out of the regional market by the early 1960s.
My shortest ever commercial flight was from Long Beach to Burbank, which according to Google is about 55 miles by car. In those days, American flew MD-80s* on a three-stop route from Burbank to Chicago to Long Beach and finally back to Burbank. I’m pretty sure they didn’t offer any tickets for the short leg; the LBA stop must have been only to discharge arriving passengers, and to take on those starting for Chicago.
*MD-80: An updated version of the DC-9, with a T-tail and two rear-mounted engines on the fuselage. Usually coach has a 3+2 seating configuration which IMO makes the cabin seem more spacious. That and the fact that the rear-mounted engines make for a quieter ride in most areas of the cabin make the MD-80 my favorite single-aisle plane.
I hope you got a hell of a deal on that ticket. I had to do something like that once but it was because a big snow storm socked in the entire Northeast and screwed up air traffic for days. I just told the ticket agent to send me and my then wife anywhere away from Boston and she said she would but we would have to negotiate our own seats from that point on to get to my parent’s house by Christmas two days later. I took it thinking it couldn’t be that bad but it was.
We ended up going Boston –> Chicago (forced to stay somewhere north of Chicago that night) –> Atlanta the next day –> Memphis –> Houston (stay in Houston that night) –> back to Atlanta –> Monroe, LA –> Shreveport, LA –> Drive to Ruston, LA. We arrived Christmas morning just in time to open presents but we didn’t have any to give ourselves because the luggage was lost after that nightmare itinerary and never found.
You might not like Nature Air in Costa Rica then. Here is the passenger view for people near the front like I was. It is an awesome airline and extremely fun if you like airplanes. You just bounce in an out of these primitive jungle airstrips several times an hour (the one that is depicted is Nosara and one of the more developed ones). I had to go to the bathroom really bad during one middle stop so I asked the flight attendant/copilot what I could do and she just pointed to a group of trees off of the side of the runway and that got the job done just fine.
Definitely from Honolulu to Lanai, about 70 miles on Hawaiian Airlines. There were about eight people on board, and it took about 20 minutes. The plane was this tiny thing, (to me anyway), kinda like this, although I don’t think it was as big as that.
I had never been on a plane that small before, and I remember being startled when it lifted off - it didn’t need as much runway to get off the ground as I was used to.
I liked the stewardess doing her safety speech: “The exit (singular) is right there, and in the event of a water landing (pretty friggin likely) your seat can be used as a flotation device…” And then she announced the “beverage service” - which consisted of passing out plastic cups of fruit juice with those little metal lids, then actually collecting the trash from the eight of us when we were finished. This entire presentation went on during the ten minutes or so that we were airborne.