Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in o

Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in one hop. ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most all air cargo between China and the mainland U.S. passes through Anchorage. The Anchorage FedEx hub is only passed by Hong Kong and Memphis in terms of volume, and the UPS hub is also one of the largest for that company. That's counterintuitive when you look at a flat map, but not on a globe. Here's a flat projection of some great circle routes: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN Note that the shortest path goes a lot closer to Alaska than it does Hawaii.