Jeremy Clarkson....his diarrhea-like frankness, fascination with moving things and quirky British humor would make an ideal host to this documentary.

Now...does anyone know the head of programming at the BBC?

and I love it. One of my favorite Ask the pilot columns!

(Small glitch: JNB got left out of the summary of airports.)

I've read enough accident reports and I know I'm not getting on a Korean Air flight. Sounds like fun otherwise.

does anyone have suggestions for international travel? is the local travel agent the best, or are there good online sites? how about travel with kids?

He wrote a short story about a man who collects his dead wife's life insurance, buys a suitcase full of international tickets and decides to travel all over the world the rest of his life, without a passport, by never leaving the international arrivals area anywhere on the planet.

And I thought a three-hour layover in Las Vegas was terrifying...

Used to be you could start on the Concorde, but no more, so:

Start with a Queen Elisabeth II trip across the Atlantic. Then take a gypsy caravan (wagon) trip in Ireland (easily available).

Then take the Orient Express to Istanbul. Then take a Greek ferry to Alexandria, and a boat up the Nile. Then take a camel through Sinai....

And you eventually can get to a balloon over the Serengeti and an elephant through Thailand, and a canoe off Hawaii, plus a mustang down into the Grand Canyon, and finally, blissfully, maybe regretabbly home.

Modes of transport can be a joy.

...was Tony Bourdain's head exploding at the very thought of this trip.

Last time I checked you really need to get into the open air to get to Hilton Schiphol at AMS. The Sheraton you can reach by walkway.

Well 21 days of just planes, Jetways and transit hotels and minibars. Way to travel I suppose. But can you certify that this trip will not lead to cabin fever, claustrophobia and plain old varicose veins? But seriously what are the medical implications though? Any aviation medical expert out there??

I'm sure there was a point to this fantastic waste of time and money, but it's whooshed right by. being stuck last weekend in a little German airport for eight hours then parked at a ghastly roadside hotel by KLM merely reinforces my general loathing for airports and airport hotels. oh and KLM.

Michael Palin! He has long experience in making documentaries about long, arduous, semi-arbitrary trips around the world.

Maybe, though, a better show would be to travel around the world on this itinerary and point out all the things that can be visited in the course of a standard overnight layover... It would cost just a little more than the hellish jaunt Patrick has described here, but would be much more entertaining.

Jeremy Clarkson's 2004 series 'Inventions that Changed the World'. He flew round the World by commercial jet in a week. IIRC it was London, NT, LA, somewhere in the Pacific that sounded like 'muh', New Zealand, Australia, London.

He was allowed off the plane, he didn't use veal class but he still came back looking half dead.

I'm sure it's out there on the torrent sites. But perhaps our American friends had best be prepared for Clarkson, he doesn't actually like America much - and he says so.

First off, you'd be MUCH better off fitting such a trip inside of a Star Alliance 39K mile F class round-the-world ticket. You could do a similar trip in MUCH more comfort.

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Second, I'm doing something similar with the GF next month (albeit I plan on stopping and getting out to see the sights here and there, so I guess it doesn't really count).

JFK-ARN-KUL-CMB-SIN-AKL-ICN-CDG-DKR-MXP-JFK

Good times.

I like the inclusion of all the continents, and several countries (though the loop around Europe seems a bit odd). It also looks like it may meet the antipodal requirements for a trip around the world by the groups that certify such things. You could, if you wanted to extend the trip some, probably hit several other US and European airports without too much trouble.

As far as jetways go, while I like the comfort of going to the lounge to the plane without having to endure rain, snow, or hot/cold weather, I miss seeing the entire plane while boarding. You just don't get a sense of the plane while boarding from a jetway.

A neighbor of ours used to make little treks like this around the country when he was in college. His father was a pilot for some airline so his immediate family could fly anywhere for free, and during his summer vactions, if he didn't have anything else to do on a weekend, he would sometimes fly around the country just to do it. If he had a layover, he might venture out of the airport, but generally he just went from flight to flight to flight for 2 days and wherever his whims took him. He also used to do goofy things like collect newspapers from each stop, take picures of himself at each location, mail postcards to himself from each place... etc... Absolutely pointless except to do it.

Given that the route is Start-MIA ... MEX-start, why didn't you pick a starting point with an airport hotel? DFW and ORD both fit the bill and have easy, frequent flights to MIA & MEX. JFK is kind of a cop out.

As iCowboy has said, Jeremy Clarkson did a similar thing for the BBC a couple of years ago. He did look like a zombie when he emerged from the final leg.

The "survivorman" has faced being adrift in the open, shark-infested ocean, being baked at 135 degrees in the desert with nothing to eat but scorpions and rattlesnakes, lonely nights in the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic and the crocodile-infested waters of tropical swamps, but I doubt if even he could survive punishment like this.

Your plane parks on the tarmac and you need to exit the plane via stairs to a waiting bus that shuttles you to the terminal? You're breathing fresh air and setting foot on local soil (er, local concrete or asphalt). I did just that when landing at CDG in December (AA from Dallas).