SUNSITE

This morning, very early in the morning, my Suzy caught a jet plane back home to Australia. She left home at 04:40 and will arive at her sisters place in Melbourne at 23:00 tomorrow, Icelandic time. That makes for 44 hours and 20 minutes of total traveling time. There of 3 hours with Iceland Express and 25 hours with Singapore Airlines. I guess thats not too bad for 19.000km of traveling! That makes on average 7km a minute or 429km per hour. This is a bit of an improvement from flying to Australia with Qantas in 1939. Qantas Airways operated Clipper flying boats built by The Boeing Co. on flights from London to Sydney. The journey took 10 days and required 32 stops. Sailing there in the days of colonization would have taken even longer than that though. The fastest time from England to Melbourne under sail was (and still is) 63 days set by the Clipper Thermopylae. A generally reasonable sailing time would be a little over 100 days making the average speed of travel a little over 7km per hour, considerably slower than I bicycle to work. Now Boeing are building a new long range airplane that will fly direct from london to Sydney. This plane is called Boeing 777 and will take 19 hours to get from London to Australia. That will theoretically bring the door to door time down by 4 hours. In theory it should be possible with the current flights system to shorten Suzes current travel time by 12 hours by making all flights connect very tightly and leave your home at the last minute. That however still makes the total travel time 36 hours or 32 hours with the new 777. That would make the average speed about 600km/hr, a little faster than I do on my bicycle.