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Airplane over contrails resembling the Scottish flag
Virtually every fan who traveled from Scotland to North America by the World Cup hopped aboard a plane for the journey. That includes a couple of guys who decided to fly themselves, and they spent close to a day in the air in a tiny aircraft while landing in four different countries in order to watch their team in person.
If you wanted to travel from the United Kingdom to North America a century ago, your only real option was hopping aboard one of the ocean liners that typically needed close to a week to make their way across the Atlantic Ocean.
Members of the United States and British navies both completed the first transatlantic flights in 1919 (the latter was responsible for the first of a non-stop nature), but it took two decades until Pan Am orchestrated the first commercial one when 22 passengers were ferried from New York to Europe in 1939.
We’ve come a long way since then, as air travel has become the standard method of transportation for people who need to get across The Pond. That includes the Scottish soccer fans who decided to make the trek to the 2026 World Cup, but a couple of supporters opted for a slightly different route to get there.
Two guys from Scotland spent 22 hours in a small plane to get to the World Cup
People who took a flight from Glasgow or Edinburgh to get to the 2026 World Cup had to spend around seven hours on a plane where they had access to the various amenities designed to make a long-haul commercial trip as painless as possible (including the beer supplies that ran out before some of them arrived).
However, as the BBC reports, that was not the case with David Smith and Fraser MacIntyre, who opted for a slightly less glamorous journey through the air.
Smith and MacIntyre respectively serve as the chairman and vice-chairman of Ayr United, a soccer club in the coastal town that lends its name to the team that competes in the Scottish Championship (the country’s second-tier league).
The duo has access to “Ayr Force One,” the name given to a Cirrus SR22T G5, a small single-engine propeller plane that can seat up to five people (and does not have a bathroom). They were driving back from one of their team’s matches when MacIntyre raised the possibility of using it to fly to the World Cup in Scotland was able to qualify, and Smith said he was down.
The team ultimately punched its ticket for the first time since 1998, and they followed through on that plan in a quest to get to Boston for their showdown with Haiti last Friday.
According to the plane’s flight records, the two men took off from Glasgow Prestwick Airport on Tuesday afternoon before touching down in Reykjavík, Iceland to refuel. They subsequently headed to Kulusuk, Greenland on Wednesday before making their way to Iqaluit in the Canadian territory of Nunavut on Thursday morning.
That preceded two more stops in the country—Goose Bay in Labrador and Montreal—and the final leg took them to Quebec’s biggest city to Providence, Rhode Island, where they landed on Friday with plenty of time to spare to head up to Boston Stadium and watch Scotland defeat Haiti after collectively spending 22 hours (and nearly 5,000 miles) in the air.
Well done.