clearly, all IETF meetings should be in Cape Town, Wellington, or Perth, because more time in the air means more time without interruption where drafts can be read before the meeting. quiet time on a plane can be productive time. Lloyd Wood http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/ ________________________________________ From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark Nottingham [mnot@xxxxxxxx] Sent: 31 May 2013 10:59 To: ietf Discussion Subject: Time in the Air 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/