1. "YOU KNOW FIRST STOP IS ALWAYS ISTANBUL"
Eric Adams had an idea.
The mayor of New York City was discussing a potential trip to Easter Island with his partner. The famed island of the moai lies thousands of miles off the Chilean coast, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Its Mataveri International Airport is the most remote in the world, but if you wanted to get there from New York, you'd almost certainly fly LATAM Airlines straight to Chile's capital, Santiago, which has direct flights to Easter Island.
But Adams had something else in mind. He asked his partner whether they could make the trip with Turkish Airlines.
Huh?
A slight detour
Eric Adams' suggested flight itinerary to Easter Island

Adding two extra ocean crossings to your trip is certainly a strange choice. But as it turned out, it wasn't merely an odd proposal. It was perplexing enough to merit federal corruption charges.
Have you ever made a suggestion so outlandish that you got indicted by the feds? I doubt it. But, you see, this wasn't Eric Adams' first rodeo. From 2016 to 2021, he made undisclosed trips to India, China, France, Hungary, Ghana, and, of course, Turkey – all on free Turkish Airlines business class tickets! No wonder he wanted to get to the South Pacific the same way, even if it meant an extra 20 hours in the air.1 Turkish Airlines had to tell his partner they didn't have routes between New York and Chile, because of course they didn't. In the end, federal prosecutors accused Adams of illegally accepting all of this free travel through the Turkish government.
"You know first stop is always Istanbul," Adams reportedly texted his partner in response to her surprise that he was in Turkey en route from New York to France. Now obviously, flying to Istanbul to get from New York to Paris is ridiculous. But my claim is this: Eric Adams could not have picked a better airport or airline to get into an (allegedly) corrupt relationship with for all of his foreign travel needs.
That's because Istanbul Airport is the most international airport in the world. Take a look at this interactive map.2 (You can hover over any airport to view its information.)
Turkish de(f)light
All countries with flights from Istanbul Airport, Turkey
It's almost surprising that you can't fly to Chile through Istanbul. According to Turkish Airlines, the Guinness World Record3 for "most countries flown to by an airline" is theirs. There are 190 countries in the world with civilian airports in operation.4 115 have direct flights from Istanbul. That means you can pick any country in the world at random, and odds are you can fly there from Istanbul. No other airport even gets to 100. Look at the reach: virtually every country in Europe, the vast majority of Asian countries, and even more African nations than just about every airport in Africa. Add eight countries in the Americas for good measure. Istanbul is the world's hub.
I guess that makes New York City the Istanbul of America.
2. I FOUND EVERY INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IN THE WORLD*
But this isn't a story about Eric Adams. It's a story about the entire network of international flights that has made our world feel so small. And to tell you that story, I have to take you all the way back to the beginning.
It all started in 2020, when a few friends and I came up with a question we didn't know the answer to. That question was the following:
"What is the smallest number of airports you need in order to fly to every country in the world?"
That is, take all of those 190 countries with airports operating regularly scheduled commercial flights. Consider an international airport in one of those countries, like Istanbul Airport. You can fly from Istanbul to 115 countries, so that leaves 75 countries you can't fly to. Add another airport – let's say you can fly from this airport to 30 of those 75 remaining countries. That leaves 45 countries you haven't yet found a way to reach. So you keep adding airports, on and on, until you have a network of airports from which you can fly to every country in the world. The question was: what is the smallest this network could possibly be?
It was a question that, surprisingly, no one had ever asked before. At the time, we tried answering it by looking up the Wikipedia pages of major international airports – Istanbul, Paris, Dubai – and counting the countries in their lists of destinations, working our way down until we had a set of airports that "covered" the whole world. It was, ultimately, guesswork.
Deep down, I knew there was only one way to find the real answer to this question. I would simply have to find every international flight in the world.
Why? Well, to come up with a comprehensive answer, I needed comprehensive data. I needed to identify at least one main airport in every country, and for each of those airports, I needed a definitive list of every country one could fly to. So, at the end of 2022, I did just that. I went back to Wikipedia and turned all of those airport destination tables into a 190 by 190 Google Sheets matrix, with each cell representing a pair of countries with either a flight between them or no direct connection. I recorded thousands of flights and wrote some Python code to transform the data into an answer. My discovery of this answer was to be the first entry in a project I would call PVP Productions, to be published in 2023.
As you may have noticed, it's now 2025.
A lot of time had passed. And in that time, the flight map changed, and I came to the horrifying realization that Wikipedia airport destination lists weren't necessarily the most authoritative source on flight routes. It turned out that several flights listed by Wikipedia didn't actually exist. I had two options: re-examine all of the thousands of flights I had recorded, or start over with a different strategy.
I chose the latter.
At the end of last summer, I returned to this project. This time, I used Flightradar24 to look at flight maps, so I would be 100 percent sure the flights were real. I went to all of the airport pages I needed to go to. I recorded all of the countries they had flights to. And I double-checked them in the lead-up to this publication.
Let me address the asterisk: obviously, I didn't record every international flight in the world. For example, it doesn't matter that Dubai International Airport has flights to Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and more; I just needed to know that you could get from Dubai to the United States. It would be more accurate to say that I found every regularly scheduled flight that connected unique origin and destination countries.5
But that would be too many words. And besides, there were 4,564 of them. So it feels like I found every international flight in the world.
Wheels up
All 4,564 flights that connect unique origin and destination countries
This is a reproduction of the map you see at the top of this page. Those 4,564 flights connect 2,338 pairs of countries (while most pairs of countries have flights back and forth, a few do not). I can't be absolutely sure I haven't missed anything, and airlines change their flight schedules all the time. But this is as close as I could possibly get.
At least no one else answered the question in those five years.
Finding every international flight in the world* affords you some luxuries, like the biggest feature in PVP Productions history. In the next installment of this three-part series, I present to you the definite answer to the question of how few airports you need to visit every country in the world. And in the final chapter, we take a trip on the weirdest flight in the world.
Read Part Two, "How to fly to every country in the world," here. Part Three, "The Wrong Brothers," drops Friday, February 14. ∎
The Aviation Game continues →1. Just take another moment to appreciate the audacity of that idea. ↩
2. All interactive maps in this series were made using Plotly.js. Plotly uses country borders from Natural Earth; as a disclaimer, note that Natural Earth's official disputed boundaries policy – which includes Crimea as part of Russia, Somaliland as its own independent state, and most of Western Sahara as contiguous with Morocco – does not represent the opinion of PVP Productions. ↩
3. You'll see some bigger numbers for Turkish Airlines' country tally in articles like the one linked here, but those numbers include flights like their São Paulo-Buenos Aires service (adding Argentina to the list). I'm only counting countries with direct flights from Istanbul – so Brazil counts, but not Argentina. ↩
4. The European microstates of Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City have no airports. Palestine's airports have been defunct since 2004, and Ukraine closed all of its airports in 2022 following the Russian invasion. ↩
5. To be even more specific, this means scheduled flights that operate year-round – no seasonal or charter flights. ↩
One last thing: if you're interested (and only if you're interested), check out the dataset of all 4,564 flights here. The basic route origin and destination details were sourced from Flightradar24, and they were merged with the freely available Global Airport Database using airport codes. This dataset is the foundation of the entire project!