China; Thursday, 02 April, 2026

I finished work at lunchtime, grabbed the bag I’d packed the previous evening and headed out to the station and on over to Heathrow.

It was a smooth journey out to the airport, including an almost perfect connection from train to bus at Feltham, so it was obvious that something with the journey would eventually go wrong.

Smooth all the way through Heathrow and onto the plane, where we pushed back almost on time, and then spent quite a bit of time in the queue to take off, but by the time we arrived in Helsinki we were only 10 minutes late.

Of course, the nasty surprise arrived as soon as I turned airplane mode off and the email and text message from Finnair popped up to say that the connecting flight was delayed by at least 70 minutes due to air traffic control restrictions.

Given the very weird route that the flight has to take that’s not surprising. With Russian airspace off-limits Finnair can’t use the polar route to China (unlike Japan where they can), and with war raging in the Middle East the main routes down through there were also out of bounds so on the previous few days the flight had either picked a careful path down through central Europe, across Turkey and the Caucuses before heading through the former Soviet Stans and then a not particularly direct route across China, or gone all the way south to mid-Africa before turning East and heading back in over India and Southeast Asia.

Thankfully I had lounge access, but it was still nearly four hours of time to kill, knowing that the earliest I’d get to sleep would be about 2am UK time, which would already be 10am in Hong Kong, so I knew my body clock was about to take a beating.