Which is the best "Flyover" state?

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If you were to hop into your personal aircraft, and plotted a straight line course taking off in one state and landing in the SAME state, how many other states might you fly over? On other words, what's the best state for “flyovers” of other states? Todd Schnieder from the Rapgenius engineering team answered that question using the R language. He created an algorithm that, for every state, traces all flight paths between two points on the border and counts the number of states the flight path crosses. For example, here's the algorithm working on West Virginia:

West VirginiaBy running this algorithm over all 48 mainland states, Todd found that the best state for conducting a interstate flyovers is New York state. A flight path originating from the North-East corner (at the border with Quebec and Vermont) and landing at the Eastern tip of Long Island would pass over five states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and of course New York itself. (The flight path grazes Rhode Island but doesn't actually cross it.)

NYC flight path

Honourable mention goes to Maryland which has a flight path crossing four states, plus Washington DC. You can see that flight path, plus more details about the R script that ran the algorithm, at the link below.

News Genius: What's the Most “Concave” State in the U.S.? Using R to Solve a Geography Puzzle

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