As we are in a 21 day lockdown, I was getting mad sitting at home and wanted to do something interesting. So I was playing this game called Airline Manager 4. While creating routes in this game, I noticed that several important cities, or rather their airports happened to be collinear. To verify my findings, I took help of a website that allows you to map the shortest distance between two airports on a world map (gcmap.com). The shortest distance route appears like a curve because of the curvature of the earth. In some cases, 4 to 5 airports were collinear. I’ve listed 13 such findings here, arranged reverse on the basis of their collinearity and importance. In case a city has multiple airports, I have chosen the busiest one here. Most of these findings are from Mumbai, since it was my hub airport in the said game.
#13: Mumbai – Sharjah – Cairo
#12: Mumbai – Leh – San Francisco
#11: Nagpur – Kabul – Moscow (Sheremetyevo)
#10: Mumbai – Kolkata – Taipei
#9: Mumbai – Muscat – Abu Dhabi
#8: Mumbai – Kabul – Dallas (Fort-Worth)
#7: Mumbai – Chennai – Adelaide
#6: Mumbai – Amman – Tel Aviv
#5: Mumbai – Munich – Paris (Charles de Gaulle)
Vienna airport, Austria also lies near the line joining the three cities, but slightly misses the mark.
#4: Mumbai – Kathmandu – Beijing (Peking)
#3: Nagpur – Hyderabad – Bengaluru – Trivandrum
We might be looking at a map of India everyday but never happened to realise that these four major cities lie on a single line. Hyderabad airport, here, misses the line by a very small degree.
#2: Mumbai – Pune – Kuala Lumpur – Singapore
#1: Mumbai – Moscow (Sheremetyevo) – Helsinki – Reykjavik (Keflawik) – New York (JFK)
How cool is it when the capitals of three European countries (Russia, Finland, Iceland) and the financial capitals of two of the world’s biggest economies lie on a single line – that’s 5 collinear cities in a row!
It was a great coincidence that so many of the world’s major cities like in a single, or an almost single line. Of course, there will be many more cities, as my research was mainly from Mumbai, with two of them from Nagpur. Comment me if you know any more triplets, quadruplets, etc. who lie on a single line.
vishalkhopkar 