This flight left Hong Kong in 2025 and arrived in LA in 2024

Cathay Pacific passengers aboard flight CX880 from Hong Kong to LAX were able to celebrate New Year’s Day twice.

First in Hong Kong and then once again when they landed at LAX.

This is because this Cathay Pacific flight took off at 12:21 am on January 1, 2025 and landed at 8:33 pm on December 31, 2024.

This is probably as close as we’re going to get to actual time travel.

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How passengers on flight CX880 managed to travel through time

The International Date Line is the imaginary line that demarcates the boundary between one calendar day and the next.

It was established in 1884, roughly 20 years before the Wrights brothers’ first flight, which is conventionally accepted as history’s first successful flight with an airplane.

Due to the way the International Date Line works, travel across different time zones makes you gain or lose time, depending on whether they’re east-bound or west-bound.

Cathay Pacific passengers experienced what is known as the ‘date line effect’.

It was a 12-hour flight from Hong Kong to LAX and it took travelers across nine different time zones, and it crossed the Date Line halfway through.

Ordinarily, no one would notice because flying across the Date Line isn’t particularly extraordinary or rare.

But, flight CX880 made headlines because of the unique way it made passengers experience New Year’s Day twice.

When flying across the world generates anomalies

For a combination of reasons, including time zones, geography and regulations, the world of aviation is full of amusing anomalies.

For example there’s a small island in Scotland that you can reach by plane, but because it’s so close to ‘mainland’ Scotland, the flight only lasts 53 seconds.

Then there’s the famous ‘Double Sunrise’ flight, which set a record that will never be beaten.

They call it the ‘Double Sunrise’ because passengers on the flight were able to see the sunrise twice, technically on the same day, because the flight time was over 30 hours.

The record will probably never be beaten because a 30-hour flight today seems unthinkable.

The longest commercial passenger flight today leaves New York City and reaches Singapore in less than a day.

The plane, an Airbus A350-900 (one of the world’s largest airliners after the Airbus A380), covers the distance in 18 hours and 50 minutes.

But the biggest Date Line-related anomaly is the time difference between the Diomede Islands.

They’re only 2.4 miles apart (3.8km) but one belongs to the United States while the other belongs to the Russian Federation, and they’re separated by the International Date Line.

For this reason, Russia’s Big Diomede, also known as Tomorrow Island, is 21 hours ahead of Little Diomede, Yesterday Island, which belongs to the U.S.