Speed and distance
May. 28th, 2012 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertI grew up in a suburb of Chicago and naturally we got around by driving around in cars, and I've had my own car since I graduated from college and got a full-time job back at the end of 1995, so I really am used to driving around in cars. I'm not some frequent-flyer air-traveler, but I was out of the country twice as a child and have been around a bit as an adult, too. Still, just these last few weeks I found the long-distance travel I've done pretty interesting to think about.
I traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of first flying to Toronto, which is pretty much the exact wrong direction to travel. I've driven my car to Toronto (for FKO), and it took me two days, one very long day to get to Port Huron, Michigan, and then about a half day to get to Toronto. Starting in Chicago some people consider Toronto to be doable in one day, most likely with more than one person trading off driving duty, but Milwaukee is at least two more hours of driving, and I was alone. You would never choose to drive to Vancouver with a stop in Toronto if you had no reason to go to Toronto, that would be completely crazy. But by regional jet, Toronto is just a one-hour flight from Milwaukee. It almost seems like the shortest distance it makes any sense to bother flying-time airborne is less than the time you'll spend in the airports-yet it takes two days in a car. It took about five hours to get from Toronto to Vancouver (against the wind) and about four hours the other direction with the wind and in a slightly faster airplane.
I was looking at the maps and the speed and altitude displays on the entertainment systems of the A320 and the 777, and just thinking in terms of running and cycling. The altitude in cruise of the various jets I was on varied from about FL330 on up to FL390 in the 777-200LR. The Flight Levels are effectively air pressure in funny units and the height above mean sea level varies with the weather, and the ground out west juts up into the sky by an amount that seems amazing to us flatlanders, but it's close enough to say that at times I was some 11 kilometers above the ground. It depends on how hard I'm working at it, but in general my 10km run time is in the general neighborhood of 50 minutes. Our altitude was a distance that would be roughly an hour of running on level ground, but the climb isn't really the long part of the journey.
When you get used to 11km/hr being a pretty good speed (running) or think 40km/hr is huge speed (on a bicycle), or end up planning commute times on the basis of a 10km/hr running average or a 20km/hr cycling average (traffic lights and stop signs are a killer compared to what you could do in a race on a closed course), getting out on the Interstate and cruising for extended intervals at 88km/hr (55MPH) seems very fast, and the airliner speeds over 900km/hr are really just amazing. Crossing Lake Michigan in a seemingly trivial amount of time was a delight. It is just a whole different thing. A thing that involves burning fuel on a scale very different from burning through "bars" and "gels" on a day-long bicycle journey. A US gallon of gasoline is worth something like 31,500 kcal. An elite athlete can burn 8000+ kcal in a day. A very fuel efficient car driven somewhat slowly can burn a gallon of gasoline in an hour, and something like a Subaru station wagon can burn as much as three gallons an hour. A pickup truck much more. A jet burns through fuel at an amazing rate, but it also has a lot more than one person on board typically. If filled up, on a per-person basis an airliner is closer to a single-occupant Prius than a single-occupant SUV, though it is very much faster. The air is thin up high in the flight levels.
I drove to the southern end of the Chicago area this weekend. It was a hot weekend with a strong wind out of the south bringing us the warm air. You feel the wind running, and generally appreciate it in the warmer months. While cycling the wind is a very obvious thing, aiding or hindering you. In an airplane you cruise at a more-or-less set airspeed and the wind speeds or slows you. In a car, in contrast, you cruise at a set ground speed and have power available far in excess of what you need for any legal speed, so you set power as needed to maintain speed in whatever wind you have. My car has a display of miles/gallon available, and I found it interesting to see it reading only down in the low to mid 50s MPG (at 55 miles/hour) on the trip south, and then returning north mostly well up in the 60s, dragging the trip average up to 61. (This display is a few MPG optimistic compared to the figure you get from the odometer divided by the gas station pump display). You can't feel the wind the way you do under human power, but you can see it in the numbers! Again, being used to working fairly hard to maintain 30 km/hr, doing 88 km/hr for hours while resting, with the air conditioner blowing cool air at a temperature controllable with the press of a button with my left thumb, really seems amazing. I think people get very jaded about car driving, but in about seven hours of physical comfort with generally minor mental effort I traveled a distance that would take days on a bicycle, and burned fuel that cost under $20.
I traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of first flying to Toronto, which is pretty much the exact wrong direction to travel. I've driven my car to Toronto (for FKO), and it took me two days, one very long day to get to Port Huron, Michigan, and then about a half day to get to Toronto. Starting in Chicago some people consider Toronto to be doable in one day, most likely with more than one person trading off driving duty, but Milwaukee is at least two more hours of driving, and I was alone. You would never choose to drive to Vancouver with a stop in Toronto if you had no reason to go to Toronto, that would be completely crazy. But by regional jet, Toronto is just a one-hour flight from Milwaukee. It almost seems like the shortest distance it makes any sense to bother flying-time airborne is less than the time you'll spend in the airports-yet it takes two days in a car. It took about five hours to get from Toronto to Vancouver (against the wind) and about four hours the other direction with the wind and in a slightly faster airplane.
I was looking at the maps and the speed and altitude displays on the entertainment systems of the A320 and the 777, and just thinking in terms of running and cycling. The altitude in cruise of the various jets I was on varied from about FL330 on up to FL390 in the 777-200LR. The Flight Levels are effectively air pressure in funny units and the height above mean sea level varies with the weather, and the ground out west juts up into the sky by an amount that seems amazing to us flatlanders, but it's close enough to say that at times I was some 11 kilometers above the ground. It depends on how hard I'm working at it, but in general my 10km run time is in the general neighborhood of 50 minutes. Our altitude was a distance that would be roughly an hour of running on level ground, but the climb isn't really the long part of the journey.
When you get used to 11km/hr being a pretty good speed (running) or think 40km/hr is huge speed (on a bicycle), or end up planning commute times on the basis of a 10km/hr running average or a 20km/hr cycling average (traffic lights and stop signs are a killer compared to what you could do in a race on a closed course), getting out on the Interstate and cruising for extended intervals at 88km/hr (55MPH) seems very fast, and the airliner speeds over 900km/hr are really just amazing. Crossing Lake Michigan in a seemingly trivial amount of time was a delight. It is just a whole different thing. A thing that involves burning fuel on a scale very different from burning through "bars" and "gels" on a day-long bicycle journey. A US gallon of gasoline is worth something like 31,500 kcal. An elite athlete can burn 8000+ kcal in a day. A very fuel efficient car driven somewhat slowly can burn a gallon of gasoline in an hour, and something like a Subaru station wagon can burn as much as three gallons an hour. A pickup truck much more. A jet burns through fuel at an amazing rate, but it also has a lot more than one person on board typically. If filled up, on a per-person basis an airliner is closer to a single-occupant Prius than a single-occupant SUV, though it is very much faster. The air is thin up high in the flight levels.
I drove to the southern end of the Chicago area this weekend. It was a hot weekend with a strong wind out of the south bringing us the warm air. You feel the wind running, and generally appreciate it in the warmer months. While cycling the wind is a very obvious thing, aiding or hindering you. In an airplane you cruise at a more-or-less set airspeed and the wind speeds or slows you. In a car, in contrast, you cruise at a set ground speed and have power available far in excess of what you need for any legal speed, so you set power as needed to maintain speed in whatever wind you have. My car has a display of miles/gallon available, and I found it interesting to see it reading only down in the low to mid 50s MPG (at 55 miles/hour) on the trip south, and then returning north mostly well up in the 60s, dragging the trip average up to 61. (This display is a few MPG optimistic compared to the figure you get from the odometer divided by the gas station pump display). You can't feel the wind the way you do under human power, but you can see it in the numbers! Again, being used to working fairly hard to maintain 30 km/hr, doing 88 km/hr for hours while resting, with the air conditioner blowing cool air at a temperature controllable with the press of a button with my left thumb, really seems amazing. I think people get very jaded about car driving, but in about seven hours of physical comfort with generally minor mental effort I traveled a distance that would take days on a bicycle, and burned fuel that cost under $20.
