An extended trip to Asia and Australasia demonstrates the problems the different time zones of the world pose for business. People call you bright and early from an English morning, acknowledging only perfunctorily that it is late evening in Sydney, that you have already downed a glass or two of Australian wine, and that you would like nothing more than to get to sleep.

It is widely recognised that part of London’s competitive advantage in financial services is derived from its time zone. Not because the power of the Royal Navy established Greenwich Mean Time as the standard for the world, but because the business day of London overlaps with those of other  global financial markets. At 9 AM GMT in London, it is 5 PM in Singapore and Hong Kong and 6 PM in Tokyo. Sydney is slightly less convenient (as I have noticed) but in European summer the difference reduces from eleven to a more palatable nine hours. And at 5 PM in London, it is midday in New York and 9 AM in San Francisco.

The maximum time difference easily managed is between eight and nine hours, so for every location there are about seven time zones difficult to access. London’s good fortune is that these times zones span the Pacific Ocean, where not many people live. (Sorry, New Zealand and Hawaii)  

But do the same exercise elsewhere and the answer is much less satisfactory. For Tokyo, the area more than eight but less than sixteen time zones away covers eastern America and Western Europe. If New York is indeed the city that never sleeps, perhaps it is because Asia is doing business in the late evening and early morning of Eastern Standard Time. London’s advantage is here to stay.

I wondered if similar reasoning could be applied to airport hubs. The maximum range of a modern commercial jet is around 12000 km, and the circumference of the earth is around 40000 km, so you can fly nonstop from any location to around 60% of the earth’s surface, just as you can talk business in real time to a little more than 60% of possible locations. A good location is one whose 60% is well chosen.

But there is a difference between the finance and aviation problems. The earth is a sphere, and while what matters for time zone is longitude what matters for travel is radial distance. First time fliers from London or New York to Tokyo are surprised how short the flight is, but that is because the plane takes a polar route.

So while what matters for finance is that hardly anyone lives in the Pacific Ocean, what matters for flight is that hardly anyone lives in the southern hemisphere. (Sorry again New Zealand, but almost 90% of the world’s population is found north of the equator)

The admirable website FreeMapTools enabled me to draw a radius round any location. Despite the excellence of equatorial Singapore’s airline and airport, that city has limited potential as hub because the territory which cannot easily be reached non-stop is the American continent. SIA has abandoned direct flights to the USA after failing to attract enough premium business to make an 18 hour flight profitable. From New York, aircraft struggle to reach southern Africa and, more significantly Southeast Asia.

        But from Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand are the only major destinations out of reach and from the Gulf you can get to almost everywhere except South America.  That is why Dubai and London are the world’s largest international airports.

At Sydney Airport they have just called the flight to Dallas; confused passengers will land at around the same time they take off after fifteen hours in the air. And I am for Wellington, with an almost unmanageable 13 hour time difference to London.

Citation

https://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm   radial mapping

http://www.radicalcartography.net/    hemisphere populations