Re: [IETF] RE: Time in the Air

We now live in a blessed, sort-of, time, where you perhaps have
in-flight Internet but no-one presumes you do, so you get the Internet
and its benefits without the constant distraction of other people
calling, emailing and expecting immediate answers and all that :D

Completely off-topic too, but since I live in the southernmost capital
city of the world, and certainly not the best served by airlines, I use
*a lot* the services of the Great Circle Mapper, http://gcmap.com in
order to estimate flight times and shortest routes.

To estimate flight times, you need to enter your speed. Completely
unscientific experimenting on my part yielded that for short flights
(less than 2.5 hours) you should use 750 km/h and for longer flights
either 800, 850 or even 900. This is good enough for getting quite
accurate results. This takes into account the low speeds phases of
flight (climb out and landing approach).

Oh... and your results are fully bookmark-able, so you don't need to
reenter data to revisit a previously analyzed route.

E.g. two possible routes for my next IETF trip:

http://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=MVD-CDG%2CCDG-TXL&DU=km&DM=&SG=850&SU=kph
http://www.gcmap.com/dist?DU=km&P=MVD-GRU,+GRU-FRA,+FRA-TXL&SG=850&SU=kph

( I haven't really checked whether the FRA-TXL flight actually exists,
just an example )


The guy is going to completely hate me for the traffic he is going to get :D

cheers!

~Carlos

On 5/31/13 2:47 PM, Warren Kumari wrote:


On May 31, 2013, at 10:03 AM, <l(_dot_)wood(_at_)surrey(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> 
wrote:

clearly, all IETF meetings should be in Cape Town, Wellington, or Perth, 
because more time in the air means more time without interruption where 
drafts can be read before the meeting.

quiet time on a plane can be productive time.


Until more airlines start offering in-flight Internets…

I treasure my time on a plane, as it mean I can actually write some draft, 
etc. Once there is Internet -- yes, I *could* always just turn off my Wifi / 
not sign up for the in-flight bits, but I'm not disciplined enough.
I end up deciding I quickly need to look up some reference and then: 
http://xkcd.com/214/

W

Lloyd Wood
http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/

________________________________________
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org [ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On 
Behalf Of Mark Nottingham [mnot(_at_)mnot(_dot_)net]
Sent: 31 May 2013 10:59
To: ietf Discussion
Subject: [IETF] Time in the Air

In an attempt to inject some data into the discussion, I wrote a bit of code 
that figures out how much time, given your home city, you would have spent 
in the air if you'd attended all IETF meetings since IETF74 (i.e., from 2009 
onwards).

The first column is the "home" airport.

The second column is the great circle time between the home airport and the 
nearest large airport to the IETF meeting, hhh:mm. This doesn't count things 
like transit time, taxiing, takeoff and landing overhead, indirect routing, 
etc. As such, this is an ideal number; the only way to achieve anything 
close to it is to have a private jet (with exceptional range).

The third column is the time (hhh:mm) using the shortest-time routing on a 
travel booking engine. This is first-takeoff-to-last-landing time.

Both numbers assume round trip between "home" and the IETF airports.

SFO  204:10  282:04  // San Francisco
BOS  197:42  297:38  // Boston
ATL  205:44  297:28  // Atlanta
ANC  197:12  345:54  // Anchorage
LHR  198:02  249:44  // London
FRA  202:10  255:22  // Frankfurt
FCO  223:52  283:04  // Rome
SVO  211:28  287:14  // Moscow
TLV  264:12  334:22 // Israel
DXB  293:26  344:34 // Dubai
NRT  259:00  314:38  // Tokyo
HKG  296:38  359:22  // Hong Kong
BLR  332:28  448:24  // Bangalore
MEL  450:28  556:04  // Melbourne
AKL  442:24  569:04  // Auckland
JNB  414:30  498:22  // Johannesburg
EZE  411:10  522:56  // Buenos Aires
GIG  381:56  488:32  // Rio de Janeiro

Draw your own conclusions, of course.

One observation is that there's a 3+ days-in-the-air per year variance if 
you're a full-time participant, depending on where you live. I.e., more than 
one day-per-meeting difference, on average. In the air alone.

Another is that, perhaps surprisingly, the "closest" homes to all meetings 
are in Europe, not the US (at least by shortest-time routing).

I can run other airports upon request, as well as make source available, but 
will do so conservatively, so as not to incur the ire of the services I'm 
(ab)using.

Regards,

P.S. The IETF airports chosen were:

 IETF_airports: [
   "ORL",
   "ATL",
   "YVR",
   "CDG",
   "TPE",
   "YQB",
   "PRG",
   "PEK",
   "AMS",
   "LAX",
   "HIJ",
   "ARN",
   "SFO"
 ],

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/