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/