ROMA – There is a small paradox that also takes shape this New Year’s Eve: some flights take off “in the future” (2026) and land “in the past” (2025). It’s not science fiction, it’s not a marketing gimmick or even a calendar error.
It is the very concrete consequence of how we have divided the planet into time zones and of an invisible line, drawn in the Pacific, which decides when a day begins and ends: the International Date Line, the date line.
The clock does not show the same time everywhere. There are places that, when it is still evening in Rome, are already the next day. And there are others who, while Europe has entered the new year, are still experiencing the last hours of the old year. The difference can be almost 24 hours. An extreme example: some of the islands Kiribati (in Oceania) and Hawaii are practically “separated” by a whole day.
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From Sydney to the USA
That’s why, around New Year’s Eve, something curious happens: if you leave on January 1, 2026 from a place that is far ahead of the clock and fly to a destination far behind, you can land when it is still December 31, 2025 there.
You have truly experienced the change of year, but the local calendar “takes you back”. It’s the same mechanism whereby, at any time of the year, you can take off from Sydney on a Monday afternoon and arrive in the United States on the morning of the same Monday: you cross time zones that subtract hours.
In the specific case of New Year’s Eve 2025-2026, the analyzes based on the published flight programs (those that the companies upload into the systems and which then end up in the booking engines) identify a group of connections that make this leap “backwards”: flights that, according to local time, depart on January 1, 2026 and arrive on December 31, 2025.
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From Asia to North America
They are mainly transpacific routes: Asia or Oceania towards the west coast of North Americawhere the clock is much further behind. Among the most striking examples are an Air New Zealand connection from Auckland to Rarotonga (in the Cook Islands), an ANA flight from Tokyo Haneda to Los Angeles, and some Cathay Pacific routes from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver.
The same “family” also includes a flight Hainan Airlines da Shenzhen a Vancouvera Starlux from Taipei to San Francisco and a United from Guam to Honolulu: the Pacific and time zones do most of the work here too.
Then there is an even more spectacular case, because it shows that you don’t even need hours of flight to change the year: the Samoan archipelago. On one side there is Samoa (independent state), on the other American Samoa (territory of the United States).
They are very close, but they are on different sides of the date line. Result: a flight of a few minutes between Apia (in the Samoa area) and Pago Pago (in American Samoa) is enough to “go back” to the day before.
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The delays
Of course, no one is time traveling in the physical sense of the word. You are not getting younger, you are not erasing what happened, you are not “rewinding” reality. You’re just changing reference: calendar and time are local labels that we use to coordinate. If you quickly cross many time zones, those labels change faster than we’re used to seeing while standing still.
Then there are the delays. Some planes are scheduled to take off within minutes of midnight on December 31. If the slip takes them past 00:00, on paper they leave on January 1st. But, by flying to a destination with a later time zone, they can still land when it is still December 31st there. In other words: sometimes you don’t need a “special” route, a complicated New Year’s Eve at the airport is enough.
And there is even the opposite effect, equally curious: flights that “skip” on January 1st. Some routes departing on December 31st from America to Asia and Oceania cross the date line in the opposite direction and land directly on January 2nd. For passengers it is as if the first day of the year disappeared from the calendar, swallowed up by a night in flight and a change of time.
