My gratitude to everyone who tried their luck with my Sept. 17 quiz. The challenge, if you missed it, was to identify the exact specs -- airline, registration and place of purchase -- of the die-cast model plane seen in this photograph. No fewer than a dozen of you chimed in with a perfect score. You're all winners.

But in another, more accurate way, Craig Schweickert is the winner. Schweickert, writing from Montreal, gets a free book, while I get the flattery that comes from knowing dozens of people are allegiant enough (read: bored and neurotic) to waste their valuable time on my self-absorbed games.

For those of you sleeplessly awaiting the answers, they can be found here. I suppose I could simply give you the answers, but what fun is that? Instead I'll send you clicking back to one of my best-loved columns. Best loved by me, that is. I'm often asked which selections from the "Ask the Pilot" archives I'm most fond of, and "Meandering in Miami," as I like to call it, is one of my sentimental faves. Actually, nobody has ever asked me that. But I thought you'd like to know.

Thanks also to everyone who wrote in from around the globe. If you missed it, I'd received a sudden slew of letters from overseas readers and became curious how many countries are home to "Ask the Pilot" readers. Who knew: I made a half-joking plea to readers in Mongolia, only to receive an e-mail from, yes, the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.

In fact I heard from people in 55 countries, from Pakistan to Sudan to Peru. My favorite was a letter from a U.S. serviceman stationed in Ar-Ramadi, Iraq. (Almost as intriguing were three separate letters from Finland.)

Being the cutting-edge sort of guy that I am, I've chosen to forgo my original pins and wall map idea for something we all can share. For a graphic representation of "Ask the Pilot's" ever-widening multinational domination (at least before Getline stepped in), check this out. If you notice yourself unaccounted for, let me know.

World66.com does not allow you to select individual cities, so the swaths of color are a bit misleading (Canada, Russia). Still it's cool. Also cool is the site's choice of cartographic projection. Getting back to the picture with the toy plane, one e-mailer pointed out how my apartment decor includes a framed Rand McNally employing the dreadfully misleading Mercator projection. Here, look again. In real life, Africa is about 10 times the size of Greenland. Thanks to the grossly widened poles of Mr. Mercator (Gerardus Mercator, 1512-1594), my atlas shows otherwise.

That's what happens when you crush a spherical planet into a rectangular map. There are many different types of projection, but one that attempts to maintain perpendicular intersections of latitude and longitude -- helpful in calculating courses without need for a globe and some fancy math -- gives us giant Greenlands and oversized Antarcticas, the deformity worsening in distance from the equator. World 66 isn't perfect -- it looks like it might be a Robinson projection -- but it's closer to scale. Says Rand McNally: "Mercator's projection, upon which true bearings of course can be measured directly, has been used by nearly all navigators since about 1600. To the north and south, distortion increases rapidly."

(If any of this sounds familiar, it was part of a column I wrote in 2002 about "great circle" air routes, addressing why passengers are often mystified to find themselves over the Arctic on flights between Europe and America.)

I once met a really cute clerk who worked at the Globe Corner Bookstore over in Harvard Square -- one of my favorite local haunts, and one of country's best outlets for maps and travel guides (including a single, still unsold copy of "Ask the Pilot"). Before refusing to give me her phone number, she explained how this was known as the "Rand McNally syndrome," an affliction through which thousands of American children grow up thinking Greenland is larger than the United States, Iceland larger than Texas.

Good for navigation, bad for kids.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

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