Published on 11:01 AM, January 04, 2018

Flight Takes Off In 2018, Lands In 2017

Hawaiian Airlines flight HA446 took off from Auckland on 1st Jan 2018. Photo: NDTV

Time travel, this fascinating concept of - moving between different points in time- has always been a popular topic for science fiction enthusiasts for decades.

A recent time travel-like occurrence, for instance, a flight from New Zealand to Hawaii will give such enthusiasts something to talk about for days.

Flight HA446 of Hawaiian Airlines was scheduled to take off on the night of December 31 from Auckland, New Zealand. But a ten-minute delay in departure meant the flight finally took off on 1st January 2018, reports NDTV.

Surprisingly, when it landed in Honolulu, 8 hours later, it was still December 31 2017.

It's not so complicated and apparently such incidents do occur from time to time.

It's no time travel but simply the presence of the international date line that the flight crossed while flying towards its destination. Because of the date line, Honolulu is 23 hours behind Auckland. Hence, the difference in dates (and one whole year in this case), reports NDTV.

The anomaly was noticed by an American journalist which, even though quite common, amazed Twitter.

Thanks to the occurrence, the passengers would have celebrated New Year's twice.

Flight HA446 wasn't the only flight that time-travelled from 2018 to 2017. Six other flights from Taipei took off in 2018 and landed in 2017 when they arrived in North America.