Zoooom...significantly slower?

August 31, 2007 12:17 PM

How long did it take to fly from London (England) to Tokyo (Japan) in 1973? For bonus points how much did it cost? Were there differences between the airlines at the time?
posted by satisam to travel & transportation (4 comments total)

Here's a Pan Am timetable from 1973. You'd be flying on a 747 that stopped in Frankfurt, Istanbul, Beirut, Karachi or Teheran (depending on the day of the week), Delhi, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. The whole thing, including stops, would take you 28 hours, if I've got my time zones figured correctly. (Departing 0800, arriving 2100 the next day.)

Another, non-US-based airline might have had non-stop (or fewer-stop) service, though. I'll keep looking and see what I can find.
posted by Johnny Assay at 1:12 PM on August 31, 2007

I've found another site that indicates that BOAC (one of the predecessors to British Airways) was running 707s on a London-Anchorage-Tokyo route as early as 1969. This would probably be significantly quicker than the Pan Am flight I mentioned above.

Also, the Cold War being what it was and the Soviet Union lying between Japan & the UK, things were somewhat complicated.
posted by Johnny Assay at 1:44 PM on August 31, 2007

On the other hand, getting through security was probably a breeze.
posted by dzot at 2:22 PM on August 31, 2007

Thank you Johnny Assay, your links have taken me to a bunch of other interesting information. I am glad that there are people scanning random documents like flight timetables. 7 stops from London to Tokyo must have been painful though!
posted by satisam at 11:35 AM on September 1, 2007