Featured Map for 22 December 2015:
Shortest Day, Shortest Flight

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Today, 22 December 2015, is the winter solstice and thus the shortest day of the year, at least in the northern hemisphere. (It is the summer solstice and longest day of the year for the southern hemisphere—lucky them!) Some calendars show yesterday as the big (er, little) day. This is because the solstice occurs at the moment when the sun is exactly above the Tropic of Capricorn, and reverses its apparent trek to the south and starts moving north again. This year, that moment occurred at 4:48 UTC on 22 December 2015— 11:48 p.m. EST on 21 December 2015, so for the United States and much of the Americas the solstice occurred a day earlier on the calendar.

The shortest day seems a good day to feature the shortest commercial flight, Loganair's 2.8-km flight between Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkney Isles. This flight, with a block time (gate to gate) of just two minutes and flight times as short as 47 seconds, is flown with a Britten Norman Islander BN-2 and is part of a loop from Kirkwall, operated from Westray to Papa Westray first thing in the morning and the opposite direction mid-afternoon.

Today's Featured Map shows this shortest flight, along with the trip from and back to Kirkwall.

References and additional information:

• Everything you need to know: December solstice 2015 – EarthSky (15 December 2015)
• Winter Solstice 2015: Five strange facts about the astronomical event – International Business Times (20 December 2015)
• Loganair—Scotland's Airline
  • Orkney Inter-Isles Air Services: 25 October 2015 to 6 March 2016
• The World's Shortest Commercial Flight Takes Less Than A Minute