PowerPlay Magazine

I've written a lot of informative/educational PPM Magazine articles lately and I figured I'd write a quick on here that is less educational and more entertaining. Recent events with my soccer team inspired me to write this article while I wait for my computer to spit out some work I'm actually being paid for. You see, on Tuesday my soccer team played on the road in a league game against a Quebec team. The next day they played in a Champions' League game in India. The dilemma arose in the time between games as my league game was played at 22:30 CET while the Champions' League game was played the next day at 12:30 CET. Since I am a big fan of xkcd's "what if" page where they go through the science/math of a bunch of what if scenarios (my personal favourite is this one) I thought I would do something similar.

Is the scenario my soccer team endured possible?

Let's start with the timeline. The Tuesday game started at 22:30 CET and finished at 23:00 CET. Neglecting the fact a 90min game is played in 30min we'll assume a game-end time of 23:00 CET. Now, tack on 30 minutes for post-game stuff followed by another hour to the airport and we're at 00:30 CET the day of the game. The flight from the Montreal area to India is quite long at nearly 12,000km as illustrated in the image below.

Working backwards now with a game time of 12:30 CET players need to be on the pitch for warm-up at 12:00 CET. That means at the stadium at 11:30 CET and assuming a plane-to-stadium time of 1 hour (a lower end of reality) that makes the airport arrival time 10:30 CET, a duration of 10 hours from the earliest possible take-off time to the latest-possible landing time. Now let's break down what aircraft we'd need to make this trip possible.

Modern commercial jets won't be sufficient. They travel at around 0.8 mach which translates to a ground speed of around 850km/h at 35,000 feet cruising altitude. We need to cover 12,000km in 10 hours or 1,200km/h assuming instantaneous delta-v (no speed-up or slow-down for take-off and landing) and a non-stop flight. Okay, so a modern commercial jet is not fast enough. What are some other options?

The most obvious answer would be the famous Concorde supersonic airliner. It had a standard cruising speed of over 2,000km/h at cruising altitude; this would easily be able to reach the speed necessary to make the trip. However, the Concorde's range makes it unfeasible. The commercially-used Concordes had a range of a 7,250km with potential upgrades able to get them to around 8,000km. That being said, flights 12,000km in length are possible with current technology. There are over 30 commercial routes that are over 12,000km in length ranging from LAX to Sydney at 12,051km to New York (Newark) to Singapore at 15,345km on an Airbus A340. So, while a Concorde can do it on speed, we're beat on range.

So what could get The Alphas to the stadium with enough time for a usual pre-game routine? Assume we're not going to blast them into space like little Kerbins and land somewhere in India (may not be the greatest idea), unless there is something I'm not familiar with, we're stuck with a yet-to-be-developed aircraft. (Don't worry, I checked, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird doesn't have a long enough range let alone enough capacity to carry 20 personnel.)  So, I did some digging.

One of the things I came across was a patent by Boeing that claims to have plans for a commercial jet that can fly at mach 1 (over 1,200 km/h at 35,000 ft altitude). In addition it claims to have a range of around 20,000km which is more than enough and will even cover the "cushion" required when flying (need so much extra fuel depending on nearest airport to landing location, distance, plane etc.). Additionally, the plane can carry about 300 passengers, more than enough room for a soccer team. See patent figure below.

The conclusion:
All PPM teams need to own team jets to get their players from point-A to point-B for the daily games. With many teams playing friendlies all over the world this can be expensive. However, if money is not an option, it is, nay, will be possible to travel in this manner should a plane such as the above come into production. But hey, if we're paying staff over $1million/day what is a few billion dollars towards a jet?!?!

Thanks for reading,
-Scott