Assuming that Metropolis is nearby to New York, just how long would it take for Lex to fly Lois out to Paris in a private plane? When would they need to leave if they were to eat dinner there?


Elisabeth

Commercial to Paris from New York is about 6.5 hours (based on my previous 2 trips there). But I imagine a private jet might be a little different time-wise...maybe faster. And you may have to deal with less of the gate/boarding/deplaning issues.
And 6 hour time difference...so, you'd probably have to leave early morning New York time to hit Paris around dinnertime...
That's my best guess, at least.

Jill

A commercial airliner takes about 7 hours to Paris and 8 to Milan. You can add an hour for the flight back. A learjet should be about the same, give or take half an hour.

Paris is six hours ahead of the East Coast, so if they want to eat dinner at 8pm, they would have to leave 6am, local time in the US, (adding a comfortable hour for travel from the airport to the restaurant.)

Oh, and you should add an extra hour on the trip back because the wind is slowing the plane down on the trip West.

Michael

I had something about this in Triangle and after lots of research (and prodding from Carol), we couldn't find any private planes that went that much faster than commercial means, although as Jill said, you save some time with security and boarding, etc.

Basically, given the times it takes to fly (and the estimates above seem right to me without looking it up (I've done the NY to Paris thing two or three times this year)), it's not really do-able for dinner without it taking all day and arriving home late that night. Basically, assume Michael's leave time of 6am, dinner at 8pm, finish dinner at 10 or 11pm which is 4-5 in Metropolis and they get home at 11-12pm (assuming as Michael did that it takes them an hour to get to dinner from the airport - which in Paris is not at all unreasonable - and way too little time if they were arriving at one of the major airports, but I assume they are not).

I ended up changing dinner to NY in Triangle for this reason.

Oooh, I just had an idea: How about Superman flying Lex and Lois to Paris as an engagement gift?

Michael

Oh, Michael! You're such a romantic.


Elisabeth
PS I hate it when canonical stuff is this impractical.

IIRC, when beta-ing for Nancy, I read it and thought 'you know that never really made much sense to me - they did it on Friends too and... how long *does* it take to get from say NY to Paris on a private jet?' and started looking and couldn't come up with anything remotely available in canon time period [today I think there might be a couple of planes that might be faster, but I don't really remember - and not *that* much faster]. Yeah, flying to Rome or Paris or something on a date would be romantic but you're talking 12 hours travel time minimum and that just doesn't strike me as a good time - unless there's no kids and I can sleep both ways .

Carol

Maybe Lex owned a Concorde? They were way faster... four hours, maybe? Ah, looked it up: New York - Paris in slightly less than 3.5 hours...
And, yes, Concordes still flew in the nineties - they were retired in 2003.

I did look up the Concorde . There were only 20 made and only 14 actually in service: 2 were prototypes, 2 were pre-production models and 2 'first off the line' production models; 5 are on display and the 6th will be.

Of the 14, British Airways owned 7. AirFrance has 5 plus one that crashed and one that was retired for parts in the 80s.

When I looked, there was no private equivalent to the Concorde. The Aerion won't be available until 2014 at the cost of a cool 80 mil... Popular Mechanics says 100 mil, but doesn't give a delivery date. The QSST could be ready in 2013. That seems like a lot of money - even for Lex... though the current list has Warren Buffet at 62B, Carlos Slim Helu at 60B and Bill Gates at 58B so I guess 100 mil might be like me buying a bag of MnMs...

Carol

"The fastest ever time for the crossing, the fastest ever set by a passenger aircraft, was 2 hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds. This was set by Captain Leslie Scott and his crew onboard G-BOAD, flying from New York to London, on the 7th of February 1996."

Just because there were no private Concordes in our world doesn't mean Lex didn't have one. Obviously, he picked Lois up about noon on a Saturday, and they were at a restaurant in Milan by eleven pm, local time. I know I've gone out to dinner in London at 10 pm and the place was packed with a queue outside, so eleven might not be as unbelievable a dinner hour there as here. Then he had her back home by midnight her own time.

And don't forget too that the LNC world was always shown to be just a little bit significantly more technologically advanced than our world, so you could, imo, quite easily have faster planes there and shorter journey times without raising any eyebrows.

LabRat

Argghh... You are evil, Michael.


Yes, this is what I was thinking when I first looked at this thread. And they could sleep on the way home and not really be affected by 'jet lag'.


Yep, that, too.

I figured that a person who has the means to fly trans-Atlantic has the means to have a private meal served whenever they pleased. But still, I will need to alter my story to fit the circumstances.


Elisabeth

Elisabeth, when I calculated time and distance to Milan, I added 1 1/2 hours to the London time each way. Paris is only 211 miles from London by air, which is 10 minutes by Concorde, so you can figure the flight time is 3 hours, give or take 5 minutes. Adding an hour and a half to get from picking Lois up to the airport and from landing at the airport to the restaurant, so that is a 4.5 hour trip from the time Lex picks up Lois until they stroll into the restaurant. Two hours for dinner and then a 4.5 hour trip back means he could pick her up about 2 pm and get her home about 1 am, with dinner about 6:30 by their stomachs' time. If Lois slept on the way back, they could leave about 3:30 pm and have dinner about 8 pm, and get back about 2:30 am.

But in the series, L&C were at the restaurant until midnight on their first date--and had to be at work the next morning--so an extra couple of hours might not bother her.

One thing about technology: Lex used a Learjet to get to Milan.



Michael