Travel video of the week: The world's shortest commercial flight (just 80 seconds!)
By Paul Johnson on Nov 15, 2018 in Air Travel, Europe, Regions, Speciality Travel, Travel Miscellany, United Kingdom, Videos, Western Europe
Got a tight 80 seconds to spare? It’s all the time you need to fly commercial across the Orkney Islands. The word’s shortest nonstop flight is a tiny hop between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray in the United Kingdom, a mere 1.7 miles (2.7 km) apart. For the past 50 years, Scottish airline Loganair has been transporting islanders between the two archipelagos, becoming an integral part of many passengers daily commute. Clocking in at under two minutes, this might be the swiftest and sweetest way to get to work.
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Probably best not to calculate how much that costs per mile?
And what’s the longest commercial flight? Is it London to Perth, Australia?
Or is there anything longer than that?
The longest flight is a little more complicated to judge – you can go by flight time or by distance covered. Even then, there are other factors at play – for example, winds will affect the flight time and the distance covered could be calculated by great circle distance (the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere) or by ground distance travelled (a plane might take a different route to take advantage of tailwinds, for example). Either way, flights by Singapore Airlines between Singapore and Newark seem to be the front runner currently – a whopping 15,344 kilometres by great circle distance.
I bet the safety briefing takes longer than the flight.
Don’t suppose that there’s any in-flight entertainment nor any in flight meal service.
I don’t mean to sound dumb or anything, but is there no other transport service available? Like a ferry? And I’m guessing the 80 seconds doesn’t inlcude take off and landing? I find this bit of trivia interesting.
If you watch the whole video, you’ll see there is a ferry service (it’s mentioned at 1m 38s into the video).