salut0

Wondering about airports which are near each other and which you might want to fly between because driving or other methods are laborious, but for which there are only laborious, expensive or even no routes at all…

I’m not thinking same cities or nearby places, so that excludes ideas like JFK to EWR or LHR to LGW or even LGW to BHX.

I’m thinking about something like Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana — GEO, PBM and CAY (Georgetown, Paramaribo and Cayenne) are very close geographically but seemingly impossible to fly between in any easy way.

Unlike, for example, TLV/BEY or TLV/DAM where there are political barriers that make nonstop flights impossible, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Since the three neighboring countries/territories primarily have links to their former or current colonial powers (GEO to Caribbean islands and the UK, PBM to the Netherlands, and CAY to France) it’s practically or actually impossible to construct an itinerary between them that doesn’t go hugely out of the way and require separate tickets and even separate alliances.

Jersey/Guernsey to Paris also seems impossible — that’s quite surprising…

Other ideas I had:
Djerba to airports in Libya
(maybe?) Corsica to Sardinia
Faroe Islands to Scotland
Greenland to Canada

Bonus points for showing the craziest and most expensive itineraries you can find between these sorts of points….

edited to add: actually there is a nonstop GEO-PBM but not between GEO-CAY or PBM-CAY

EXP100

AA used to have BWI/PHL for connections in PHL but that flight is now gone. Used to be mainline at one time. Less than 100 miles (around 85 miles I think). So if you're a Baltimore area AA elite and want to fly AA International out of PHL it's drive of maybe the train.

Stewie Mac

How about Kinshasa to Brazzaville? Just across the Congo, but (I think) the most reasonable connection is via Addis… turns a 16 mile trip into 3,715….

salut0

Just thought of a few more:
YHM (Hamilton, Ontario) to BUF (Buffalo NY)
SAN (San Diego) to TIJ (Tijuana)

in the middle east:
TCP Taba in Egypt
AQJ Aqaba in Jordan
ETM Elat in Israel

I remember reading that there are several airports in the Iguazu Falls border region in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay but it seems impossible to fly between them directly:

IGU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foz_...tional_Airport

AGT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guar...tional_Airport

IGR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cata...tional_Airport

salut0

Actually there does seem to be a nonstop flight!

https://www.google.com/travel/flight...hwNBcDubvRCRm8

mecabq

This is a good example. I searched for this in the past with no luck. Even hard to do with one stop in either France or Italy; probably an airline like KL/LX/LH is the best bet but out of the way.

Another example like yours, albeit a bit farther apart, is MLE-SEZ. I flew MRU-SEZ but am not aware of flights to MLE from either.

YVR Cockroach

YYJ-SEA @ 98 miles. Used to be up to (IIRC) 3 airlines that ran the route (QX/AS, AC and UA codesharing, and DL when DL had the notion of running QX out of SEA. Currently it's down to AS 1x daily which is also the only flight to/from the U.S. It's not like there is an easy alternative of going overland between the two.

Surprisingly not that much traffic other than some agricutural ones. I took the ferry from Bonifacio to Sta Teresa di Gallura shortly before it was cancelled for a while (by Saremar, route now operated by Moby Lines). . Big lamenters were the local farmers. At any rate, airport for Bonifacio is relatively far away in Porto Vecchio and the approach by sea to (or even departure from) Bonifacio is spectacular.

There was until 2015. Talk about your long, thin route though: 513 miles between Nuuk and Iqaluit and a combined population of less than 100,000 for Greenland and Nunavut.


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north...2015-1.2985006
https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arc...language-ties/

EXP100

AA has mainline between PHX and TUS which is a little less than 100 miles. Flight time is about 20-25 minutes.

salut0

I read a book a while back about Alaska Airlines and a route they did to the Russian Far East from Nome to Provideniya:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frie...laska_Airlines)

I didn’t know, but just discovered from this article, that Alaska Airlines used to have a whole network of routes in the region. 1997 seems like a world away now, with current relations between the USA and Russia:

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/30/t...wild-east.html

JayhawkCO

A couple that jump to mind for me...

ATQ-LHE. Obviously a political situation, but the land border is open between the two, but not the "air border"
Jamaica - Haiti. At their closest points, only 118 miles apart, but you'd have to fly via Miami likely to fly between the two easily.

cblaisd

Oak-sjc/sfo
cos-den
orh-bos
dfw-dal
iah-hou
mdw-ord
san-cld
PUB -COS

salut0

cblaisd I’d exclude coterminals, like OAK/SJC/SFO, MDW/ORD, IAH/HOU, DFW/DAL but the rest of your list is interesting.

And in this vein, I had originally thought of FNJ and ICN…

born sleepy

Does UX still go LAX-SNA?

YVR Cockroach

Route (operate using MD-80s) collapsed before the current millennium IIRC de to an economic crisis in Russia at that time. It was ANC to 2-3 stops in the Russian far east including Vladivostok. There was, in that era, also air service by Air Magadan between Magadan and Anchorage (operated with a 3 engine Tupolev IIRC)

JayhawkCO

UA flies this several times per day.