I spent part of today trying to sort out the long flights from Edmonton to Kolkata. The internet can be frustrating. I know there are flights that leave here at decent times, with good connections and, with a minimum of hassle, arrive at the place I want to go. Using the airline websites do not allow me to put the flights together in the combinations I want. I enter a starting point and the name of the place I want to end up at and the airline computers put together the strangest combination of connections. Why would I want to fly Edmonton-Denver, Denver-Moscow, Moscow-Singapore, Singapore-Kolkata? I would travel 25,000 km. to a destination that by the great circle is 10,000 km. The airlines want to send me all over the globe and then have the audacity to ask me if I would like to contribute some of my Aeroplan miles towards carbon credits???? I’m quite sure this does not make much sense.
Next I find that even though the distance from Edmonton to Kolkata is shorter flying west, the only flights I can find on our national airline website fly east through Europe. There are Star Alliance partners that do fly west, I just cannot find a ticket to fly that direction on the internet. Not such a big deal but flying east adds 4 or 5 hours in transit to an already long day.
I think I have come up with an idea that will help with the long flight. Since we no longer have any time constraints we will just book the flight with a one day layover at about the half way point. If we fly through Frankfurt we will spend a night each way in Germany and regen. In the next couple of days I’ll try it again and we will try to settle on a route and fix a couple of dates.