All 48 Contiguous Capitals

[NealRomeoGolf]

18 months ago I mapped out flying Route 66 (here: https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/flying-route-66.121233/)

Now I decided to map a trip that would hit all 48 capital cities in the CUSA. It looks like this starting from my home field.



It is not optimized for shortest route or anything. Just something fun. Almost 10,700 nm as is and 70 hours of flying. Maybe some day I'll make the trip.

 

[Salty]

Here, just saved you 1,000 miles. You can pay my consulting fee when you make the flight.

SPI IND KCMH LAN MSN MSP DSM LNK PIR BIS CYS DEN SLC BOI HLN OLM SLE SMF CXP PHX SAF AUS BTR JAN MGM TLH ATL CAE RDU KRIC ANP 0N4 TTN BDL BOS AUG CON MPV ALB MDT CRW FFT BNA LIT OKC FOE JEF

 

[Salty]

I fixed it to start and end from your airport

I bet it could be optimized more. I'm a geek about this kind of stuff, but my head hurt when I tried to write a traveling salesman algorithm to handle 49 stops without taking 4,000 years to run. 48! is a lot of combinations.

Hard to believe there are 12,413,915,592,536,072,670,862,289,047,373,375,038,521,486,354,677,760,000,000,000 ways to do it.

I need to learn me my graph theory better.

 

[NealRomeoGolf]

I bet my brother could fully optimize it. He's a cartographer. Mapping stuff is his thing.

 

[Initial Fix]

I wrote a traveling salesmen algorithm for all the airports in my state using excel. I learned some new tricks, but It was a one off thing to see if I could do it. When I get back to a real computer next week I’ll poke at this one too.

 

[Salty]

If you just want to hit every state you can significantly lower the miles.

3MY KPPO 3TR KMSN 55Y KFXY KABR 7L2 KCDR KCPR U53 KRVF WT33 KBNO KAAT KTMT KCDC KPGA KCEZ KRTN KEHA KPYX KRQO M18 9M6 KJAN KMVC KTLH KMQW KCAE 43A KRIC KESN 33N N87 KBDL KGDM KMHT KSFM KVSF KSCH N38 KHLG I71 KFFT KCKV KSTL 3MY

 

[Salty]

I got a branch and bound solution working for fewer cities, but it ran all night and has yet to compute a single route for 49. lol

 

[RussR]

I like the idea of flying to all 48 states, but I've always had a "problem" with the usual way of doing it ("problem" in quotes because really, it's cool any way you do it), where even just barely crossing the border is considered sufficient. So I like the idea of flying to the 48 capitals, it seems more like you've "really" been to the state.

I just mean that if you fly to, say, Toledo Suburban (humorously, the code is DUH), have you really flown to Michigan? I mean technically yes, but Toledo Suburban is like 1/2 mile from the Ohio border and is in a suburb of Toledo, OH. Literally 99.9% of Michigan is north of it, for the next 350 miles. I would guess that most people don't think of "Toledo suburbs" when they think of Michigan. Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, etc., yes.

Similarly, if you land at Garrett County, MD (2G4) in way western Maryland, the weird part where it's almost cut off between WV and PA. It's about as far as you can get from what I think most people would think of as "Maryland" (which I think would be "DC suburbs, Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay, crab cakes").

Granted, not all the capitals are really representative of how people think of the state (for example, Tallahassee, FL sure isn't), but at least your idea enforces, in my opinion, a better set of starting conditions.

 

[NealRomeoGolf]

Since we are revisiting this thread a bunch, I went and looked how many capitals I've landed in. So far I have:

Springfield, IL
Boise, ID
Pierre, SD
Nashville, TN

I've flown over ones like Indy, Salt Lake City, Des Moines, Madison, Lincoln....but have not landed there.

I was thinking it would be fun to do a YouTube channel where you fly each day to a new capital and half the vid would be the flying portion and the other half would be facts and scenes around that capital. I'm not creative enough to do such a thing. Plus, if you did it all in one trip, you'd be gone at least 2 months.

 

[GaryM]

I like the idea of flying to all 48 states, but I've always had a "problem" with the usual way of doing it ("problem" in quotes because really, it's cool any way you do it), where even just barely crossing the border is considered sufficient. So I like the idea of flying to the 48 capitals, it seems more like you've "really" been to the state.

I visited my 50th state a couple of years ago, though none of the initial visits to any state was by GA. I mostly drove but occasionally flew commercial to 48 states over a bunch of years, and flew commercial to Alaska and Hawaii.

My personal criteria for counting a state as a 'visit' was that I be there long enough for at least one meal, and if I was only changing planes and never left the airport it didn't count.

 

[Brad W]

ha ha...I've thought about that kind of thing before.... what counts as "being there"? does it count if you just connected on an airline flight through the airport for example? sleeping or staying the night? eating a meal? marking your territory like a dog does (peeing)?
NealromeoGolf....also an interesting thought...got me to thinking. This one is tough.
I can't count Richmond because neither KRIC or Chesterfield County are in the city limits
I was going to count Raleigh but I don't think RDU is in the city limits.
I was going to count Atlanta, but neither Fulton County or RYY are in the city limits. I did fly out of ATL in the Boeing 777 simulator physically sitting in the city limits I believe, but most of the airport I think is outside of city limits, simulator, and not GA, so not sure that counts.... only the Northern most runway at ATL is in the city limits
I was going to list DCA even though D.C. is not a state....but I suppose that's in Virginia...so I can't claim D.C.
I almost missed Annapolis, but ANP isn't in the city limits either....

Actually...if "in the city limits" is the criteria, this is impossible unless maybe by helicopter. Seems like many state capitols don't have airports contained within!
so
I'm gonna count landing and stopping at 5 by general aviation. Not necessarily sleeping, or eating a meal.....
Richmond
Raleigh
Atlanta
Annapolis
Washington DC

 

[Salty]

I fixed a bug and got a couple hits from the branch and bound. It's not guaranteed optimum since it's still running, and it's only 20 miles better than my manual attempt. I also cleaned up my flight plan to be actual airports instead of VOR's, so that may have made more of a difference than the algorithm. Oddly, this path is more friendly from a mountain range perspective.

KSPI KJEF KFOE KDSM KLNK KCYS KDEN KSAF KPHX KSLC KCXP KSAC KSLE KOLM KBOI KHLN KBIS KPIR KMSP KMSN KLAN KALB KMPV KAUG KCON KBOS KPVD KHFD KTTN KMDT 33N KANP KRIC KRDU KCAE KTLH KATL KMGM KJAN KBTR KAUS KOKC KLIT KBNA KFFT KCRW KCMH KIND

 

[NealRomeoGolf]

Based on that map, I'm going to need to get some oxygen.

 

[Salty]

This would be a fun trip. I think AK is higher on my list personally though. It's a long way from Florida. Probably longer than this trip.

 

[Sinistar]

My CS study of this goes back too far to remember it well enough but wouldn't this really be dominated by the fact you would never, ever allow single legs such as CA to NY to AZ to Maine, etc. Or basically there is no way it is 48!. In reality from any one location, there are more like 3...5 next nearby choices so go with 4 choices on average (3 or 2 is probably better). Therefore its more like 4! x4! x ..... x 4! X 3! x 2! . So a fair approximation would be something like (46x4!) x 3! x 2! or about 1104 x 6 x 2 => 13,248 somewhat credible options. Using just 3 choices it would be 552 options. That still seems quite high but way more believable. Or maybe I am missing something obvious here.

I would think if you gave this to 1000 pilots and had two requirements: A fixed starting point and initial starting direction, those 100 pilots would wind up with less than 1000 variants.

 

[Salty]

My CS study of this goes back too far to remember it well enough but wouldn't this really be dominated by the fact you would never, ever allow single legs such as CA to NY to AZ to Maine, etc. Or basically there is no way it is 48!. In reality from any one location, there are more like 3...5 next nearby choices so go with 4 choices on average (3 or 2 is probably better). Therefore its more like 4! x4! x ..... x 4! X 3! x 2! . So a fair approximation would be something like (46x4!) x 3! x 2! or about 1104 x 6 x 2 => 13,248 somewhat credible options. Using just 3 choices it would be 552 options. That still seems quite high but way more believable. Or maybe I am missing something obvious here.

I would think if you gave this to 1000 pilots and had two requirements: A fixed starting point and initial starting direction, those 100 pilots would wind up with less than 1000 variants.

My last solution breaks your assumption multiple times. The hop from Wisconsin for example is the fifth closed choice. Certainly there are optimizations you can do, but it's still a huge number of combos.

The hop from Michigan to Albany NY is probably 12 or more away.

 

[Winger67]

If you just want to hit every state you can significantly lower the miles.

3MY KPPO 3TR KMSN 55Y KFXY KABR 7L2 KCDR KCPR U53 KRVF WT33 KBNO KAAT KTMT KCDC KPGA KCEZ KRTN KEHA KPYX KRQO M18 9M6 KJAN KMVC KTLH KMQW KCAE 43A KRIC KESN 33N N87 KBDL KGDM KMHT KSFM KVSF KSCH N38 KHLG I71 KFFT KCKV KSTL 3MY

This will be helpful. The lower 48 and Alaska is my goal. Drove my Corvette to all of them so it'd be fun to fly over the places I've seen from the ground. Didn't think it'd be possible to do it in a week!

 

[Salty]

I'd forgotten all about this, but I had left my branch and bound program running on one of my servers and I happened to log into it this morning and noticed it was still running. After 10 days it's found a better solution, it knocked off another 200 miles and still trying...

This route is starting and ending in Augusta, Maine for simplicity, but easily adjusted.

KAUG KCON KBOS KPVD KHFD KTTN KMDT 33N KANP KRIC KRDU KCAE KTLH KMGM KATL KBNA KFFT KIND KSPI KJEF KLIT KJAN KBTR KAUS KOKC KSAF KPHX KCXP KSAC KSLE KOLM KBOI KHLN KSLC KDEN KCYS KBIS KPIR KLNK KFOE KDSM KMSP KMSN KLAN KCMH KCRW KALB KMPV KAUG

 

[Salty]

Sometimes computers are awesome, but sometimes humans are better. Just looking at the above for 10 seconds I saw an easy optimization that saved another 80 miles.

KAUG KCON KBOS KPVD KHFD KTTN 33N KANP KRIC KRDU KCAE KTLH KMGM KATL KBNA KFFT KIND KSPI KJEF KLIT KJAN KBTR KAUS KOKC KSAF KPHX KCXP KSAC KSLE KOLM KBOI KHLN KSLC KDEN KCYS KBIS KPIR KLNK KFOE KDSM KMSP KMSN KLAN KCMH KCRW KMDT KALB KMPV KAUG