Aviation – Aircraft – Flying

If you reside in Australia, you are familiar with long and very long distances. Not only flying.

Everything , even domestically is far away. People in Europe usually have no idea about the distances here.

I remember a story, a flight attendant friend told me.

She was flying for Lufthansa at a time when LH still came to Australia.

Frankfurt – Kuala Lumpur – Melbourne – Sydney and later Bangkok – Sydney. That goes back to the 90’s.

She said it was always the same. The flight would leave Bangkok very early in the morning, after the overnight sector from Frankfurt. The flight would leave BKK around 7 or 8am for Sydney.

The flight time BKK to SYD is about 9 hours. With a good tail wind over Australia, maybe even 8-8 1/2.

It takes around 4.5-5 hours before the flight reaches Australian airspace from Thailand.

Typically the captain would make an announcement that they were overflying the Australian coastline and if the weather was good, he would encourage the passengers to look out.

But that was at the far northwest corner of this continent.

Anyway, since many, if not most of the passengers were Germans, they would now start to get up, collecting their belongings, ready to disembark, hopefully soon.

But to their great disappointment, and the amusement of the crew, to be told, that it would still be another 4+ hours before landing in Sydney.

Actually, I have flown this sector maybe 30-40 times. Both originating in Bangkok or Singapore and somehow this sector on a daylight flight seems to be much longer, compared to the night one.

Not because at night I would sleep. I am a good flying-sleeper, but flying into Sydney always seemed to take longer during the daytime sector compared to back up to Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul or Tokyo.

Talking long distances. We had an Austrian supplier for many years. Often we would place orders for Western Australia with a routing directly into Perth, rather the usual Sydney.

Always came back the reply if they could not combine the Perth order with next Sydney shipment a few days later, since it would be cheaper. 

It took us a long time to get the staff to understand that Sydney – Perth is 3900+ kilometres and the cost re-shipping Sydney – Perth this way would be higher then a separate Austria-Perth shipment.

People always relate other countries to their own. So on a map, the distance Sydney – Perth or Sydney – Darwin looks not that far if you use Austria, Germany or even West Europe as your reference.

But realising that 3900km would reach from Vienna (Austria) to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic just of the West African coastline made them understand.

So distances are relative from ones individual perspective.

Equally the distance measurement.

Driving back in Germany, we would talk about distance in kilometres. But when I came to Australia I learned to express the distance in hours of driving, since kilometres on a dual carriageway are a great deal faster, then on a country road or even gravel road.

All a matter of perspective.