Planespotting: The Weekly Puzzle by Dilip D’Souza

How much can you tell about a flight schedule with just a few facts about a few of the flights?

Yashasvi, Sahir and I went planespotting the other day. From the top of a small hill in Jari Mari near one end of the Bombay airport runway, we watched planes land and take off all morning. I had a flight tracker app on my phone, so I could tell where each flight had flown in from. Here are some clues about four planes that landed in a space of 10 minutes.

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* The Airbus A380 wasn’t the fourth to land.

* Barefoot Air operated the flight from Addis Ababa.

* The blue plane landed immediately after the red one.

* The silver plane came from Colombo.

* Ricejet was the second to land.

* Hawa Hawai flies only Boeing 737s.

* Later, there was an inquiry about the flight from Bangkok, because it landed less than a minute after the A380 did, dangerously close.

* The 737 was painted blue.

* Addis Ababa doesn’t allow Airbus planes to use its airport.

* The red plane wasn’t third.

* Air Wombat flew the A380.

Questions: Where did the Airbus A320 come from? Which airline flew the green plane? When did the Jaisalmer flight land? What colour was the Boeing 747?

Scroll down for the solution

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How do you solve this puzzle, and others like it?

One way is to make a grid, as in the diagram. Put 1, 2, 3, and 4 along the top, and other details down the left, grouped by their type: airline, city, colour, aircraft name. (OR try something else on the top — the colour, why not?).

Now pick up each clue in turn and mark the appropriate spaces each time you learn something. Cycle through them until you’ve marked all the spaces with either a tick or a cross.

I’ll start this off.

Clue #1 allows us to place an “X” as shown. Clue #2 doesn’t give us anything (for now). #3 allows us to place two “X”s — I’ll leave you to figure out where. #4 gives us a tick, as shown — but what are the “X”s we can immediately fill in?

Keep at it!

Scroll down to see if you got it right.

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Answers:

1) The A320 came from Bangkok.

2) Barefoot Air flew the green plane.

3) The flight from Jaisalmer landed 3rd.

4) The 747 was green.