Thread: Perth Control,Qantas stylee

Tired of Changi,soapy massages or delights of Dubai ?

Those willing to enjoy 17 hour hop from Heathrow to Oz can fly Qantas.

The Kangaroo Route in a single bound: Qantas is to fly direct between Australia and Britain | The Economist

he Kangaroo Route in a single bound
Qantas is to fly direct between Australia and Britain

WHEN the England cricket team travelled to play Australia in the first ever Test match in 1887, the journey down under took around 50 days by steamship. (The Aussies won, as they have mostly continued to do over the subsequent 129 years.) When the team flies out to compete in the latest installment of the Ashes next year, the journey time will be much reduced. If they fly from London to Perth on Qantas, they could conceivably do it in under 17 hours, nonstop.

The Australian flag carrier announced over the weekend that it is to launch a direct service from Western Australia to London. According to Forbes the 14,498-kilometre journey will slot in behind Air India’s Delhi to San Francisco route (15,140 kilometres) to become the second longest nonstop flight in the world—although the Qantas plane will in fact be in the air for two hours longer because the India-America route takes advantage of the jet stream.

We don’t have to look back to the 19th century to see just how far things have improved. According to Alan Joyce, Qantas’s boss, when the carrier first created the so-called Kangaroo Route to London in 1947, it took four days and nine stops. The modern version will be operated with Boeing 787 Dreamliners, a super-economical twin-engined wide-body jet. Given that a half circumference of the Earth is 20,000 kilometres, we are now nudging up against the point at which any two places on the planet will be within range of a direct flight.

All of which is remarkable. But it does demand an answer to a more prosaic question: does the convenience of such as nonstop flights outweigh the horror of having to sit in an economy seat for that length of time? Gulliver has never flown one of these marathon direct routes. But whenever he has flown somewhere that has cumulatively taken over 15 hours, he has felt grateful for the chance to break the journey up—even if only with a couple of hours’ layover at an airport. Physiologically, the chance properly to stretch cramped legs and to expand one’s field of vision beyond a TV screen inches from one’s nose feels invaluable. Psychologically it is easier to chalk off the hours on two shorter flights than one whopping one.

Yet there might be another psychological phenomenon worth noting here: the "return trip effect". Researchers have long noted that a journey when travelling away from home tends to feel longer than one coming back. (Apparently even astronauts who make it to the moon report that the return to Earth feels comparatively quick.) One theory is that on the first leg of a journey we are too optimistic about how long the trip will feel, so when we arrive at our destination we sense it took longer than expected. Conversely, that makes us overly pessimistic on the way home, and so time seems to pass more quickly. That seems plausible. However, Gulliver’s own cod theory is that a long trip is akin to walking over a hill. Travelling out is mentally more exhausting because you are preparing yourself for all those as-yet-unknown situations you will encounter. The trip home is an easy stroll back to familiarity.

Either way, if Gulliver can wangle a week in Perth in 2018 to watch the Test match, his strategy will be clear. A connecting flight on the way out (if at all possible spending a couple of days in an exciting city), before a 17-hour feat of endurance on the way home. That should be just enough time to erase his frustration at England's inevitable defeat.