Halfway to Hawai'i Contest: Winning!

On our recent trip to Hawai'i, our United flight from LA to Lihue conducted a "halfway to Hawai'i" contest, where each passenger was given a chance to guess the time (or closest to the time) when the flight would be halfway to Hawai'i based on the Captain's parameters. I wondered how 'exact' it really needed to be, because something like that's a real crap shoot - or so I thought.

So . . . story problems in grade-school did me good. How about you? Given that the flight left LA at 12:08 PM Pacific Time, and the plane was traveling at 475 nautical miles per hour with a headwind of 9 nauts, and a total distance of 2444 miles to be traveled, I set out to turn my WAG (wild-ass guess) into SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess). I did my math on the page of a magazine which contained Sudoku puzzles I was working (and flunking).

Time needed to be specified in HST (Hawai'ian Standard Time) and to the second - in case of a tie.

You do the math, and post your answer in the comments. Curious to see what you come up with. And DON'T cheat off my paper! (work it out now, and post it before reading on)

Anyways, I've always been good at math, but had little faith in the idea of winning - the odds just weren't there, and I was sure that there was some sort of trickery in the technology which would cause my guess to be way off. Guess what . . . and I'm sure you already did . . . I got it right! Yep . . . well, while I felt that I had "won" unfortunately, there was a 4-way tie for the correct guess. According to the pilot, this was the first time there was a 4-way tie.

Well, truth be told, we were all 2 seconds off - but we're splitting hairs. I blame the pilot's equipment or purposeful mal-steering/overcorrectional-activities. My math was right, his equipment was wrong. 3 other people on a plane of ~180 or so people guessed the same exact time (down to the second) as I did.

Anyways, the bitch was that there was only 1 prize (a CD by a prized Hawai'ian artist) . . . which I drew for -- from a hat 3rd out of 4th -- and still lost.

I was so happy that I tied for first place that I tore my masterful work the hell out of the Hemispheres Magazine. (I wasn't going to carry the rest of the magazine around for one page, let's face the music.) Here it is.

Oh - here's the answer (if you were really clever, you spotted it on the mag page) - my answer below my name, the pilot's answer next to my name (pilot *FAIL*):