Keene store manager goes around the world in five days

Robert Worden loves airplanes. He loves them so much that he recently traveled on six different planes through five continents in as many days, never leaving an airport.

“I've always loved airplanes as long as I can remember,” he said outside 7-Eleven in Keene on Wednesday afternoon. “Every time there's a plane, I look up, and I always have. I've just been fascinated with how these big hunks of metal get off the ground, and it’s so graceful, too.”

Worden, 48, of Concord, is recognizable locally as the manager of the 7-Eleven on Court Street, and he also helps with Woodard’s Sugar House in Surry. When not working, however, he says he loves watching planes.

His father, Bernie Koenig, was an aviation mechanic for Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation and his brother, Eric Worden, is a maintenance manager for American Airlines.

“I lived in Swanzey for a little bit, like a quarter mile from the Keene Airport. And I think that's what really sparked it,” Worden said. “Since then, I'll drive down to Boston for a half day just to watch airplanes.”

He added that when Emirates flew its first passenger service A380 into Boston, he was sitting right outside the gates, about 400 feet under it, watching it land.

But one aircraft sparked the recent journey: the Boeing B747.

“I've always wanted to fly on a 747. That's been, like, [on] my bucket list for a long time,” he said. “And in the U.S., you can't just fly big metal like that. There's no 747s that fly domestically in the U.S. anymore. You can get some big planes, but not a 747.”

He resolved to take a trip to London, flying on the 747 on the journey there and the Airbus A380 on the way back, another large plane he’d wanted to experience. But he found ticket prices for such a trip to be expensive, so he started looking around for other options.

“I was like, ‘Oh, if I do this routing and change my routing, it got cheaper.’ And I'm like, ‘Why not just do this all at once?’”

He decided to fly on as many large planes not used domestically as possible, and quickly switched to his globe-trotting plan. The journey lasted from Dec. 2 to 7, beginning with a 7.5-hour flight on an Airbus A340 with Lufthansa from Boston to Frankfurt, Germany.

“Compared to U.S. airports, the experience in international airports was just amazing … I did a flight simulator while I was in Frankfurt,” he said. “That was also on my bucket list. So, I flew a 737-flight simulator. So that was a blast.”

He also took a tour of the airport, which got him up close to the Boeing 737s.

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“Most people book a flight, and it's about time and the airport. For me, it was all about the airplanes,” he added. “I literally did my bookings based on these airplanes.”

From Frankfurt, he flew on a Boeing B747-8 to Johannesburg, South Africa, a roughly nine-hour trip. Then he took an Airbus A380-800 from Johannesburg to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a trip that lasted a little over five hours, followed by a seven-hour trip from Dubai to Sydney, Australia, on another Airbus A380-800.

“I had planned just to go home from Sydney to New York, which is still a long flight, like 16 hours or something … but then I was like, I might as well get on the longest flight in the world,” he said. “So I went from Sydney back to Singapore and then to JFK just to get on that flight.”

That flight — from Singapore to New York City on an Airbus A350-900 — lasted about 17.5 hours, Worden said.

On each flight, he said he talked to the flight crew and gave them and gate agents maple syrup candies made by Woodard’s Sugar House as a gift. On the Frankfurt to Johannesburg flight — the Boeing 747 journey — he was invited to see the cockpit after it landed.

Once back in New York, he took a roughly one-hour, 20-minute flight on an Embraer E175 to round out the trip.

“I gained time all the way around, except for my little backtrack to Singapore,” he said, adding that he suddenly fell back a day when flying back to the U.S. “… I was so far ahead. And then, all of a sudden, I'm back to normal time. It was weird.”

But he said he didn’t have much jet lag because he never adjusted to the new time zones. Instead, he slept on some flights and showered at airports. And the business and premium economy seats he obtained for most flights helped, with some having seats that reclined to a flat position.

“I was ready, when I got back to Boston, to get on another airplane and go all around again,” Worden said. “If I could have, I would have.”

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Christopher Cartwright can be reached at ccartwright@keenesentinel.com or 603-352-1234, extension 1405.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.