This is the airport on Papa Westray,
one of the smallest of the Orkney Islands, off the tip of Scotland. It is just a windsock, and a hut,
and a gravel runway. I didn't pick a great day
to travel to this tiny little island. The rain is going to return in just
a few minutes, but it's still been a nice little trip out to visit the world's
oldest still standing house. [wind and rain noise] It's raining sideways. ...and also watch some seabirds. From quite a distance. That's a bird. ...that's a bird. That is also a bird. But leaving here, I'm taking the world's
shortest commercial flight from this airport to the
next island, a mile away. Which sounded like a great video. But as I started to write the script,
I found some problems. It's a commercial flight
and it's August 2021 as I record this. So masks are required,
which won't look great. And the planes in use on this route
are incredibly loud and rattly. You wouldn't hear a thing. And I'm not going to be the jackass
who's vlogging on a tiny little plane with other passengers on it, loudly
talking and bothering people and accidentally poking a selfie
stick in someone's face. I'm just going to swap this GoPro out
for a 360-camera, and just record voiceover afterwards. But... a video about commercial aviation
logistics, using voiceover? Well, that doesn't sound like me. That sounds like something that the
Wendover Productions channel would do. So, Sam? - Hey there, Tom!
- I'm going to leave this up to you. I'm going to go catch my flight. Spanning a distance of 1.7 miles or 2.7 km
over some 80-or-so seconds, the flight Tom's about to take might seem an affront to logic, economics,
environmentalism and more. But the world's shortest flight has
a very real purpose for very real people. You see, the Orkney Islands are a
sparsely-populated archipelago. The vast majority of their 22,000-strong
population lives on what's known, despite its island status,
as the "mainland", leaving only about 4,000
on the outer islands. These outer islanders need ways
of getting to the mainland, of course, but bridges are expensive, especially over some of the longer
interisland spans in the Orkneys. And while ferries do operate
throughout the archipelago, they're slow and lack a direct connection
to onward travel. Therefore, the answer is airplanes. Of course, flying is expensive. And in the world of commercial aviation,
it's typically the case that the lower the demand,
the more expensive it is for an airline to operate a route
on a per passenger basis. That's because smaller destinations lack
the economies of scale afforded by operating larger airplanes
more frequently at larger airports. So air service to places with 600 or 90
residents like Westray and Papa Westray is essentially impossible
on a free market basis. The fares would be enormous per passenger,
meaning people wouldn't choose to fly. Meaning there wouldn't be enough
passengers to fill a plane. Therefore, flights to Westray and Papa
Westray are subsidized through the UK's public service obligation scheme,
meaning only a small portion of Loganir's revenue is earned through
selling the flight's £17 or £18 tickets. Still, filling a nine-passenger plane
to Papa Westray, in particular, with its 90-person population would be
difficult even at rock bottom prices. Price elasticity only goes so far. Therefore, Loganair uses a network design
referred to as a "milk run". Essentially, it means operating a plane
like a bus or train. In this case, the BN-2 Islander aircraft
leaves Kirkwall, the largest town in the Orkneys, with passengers
destined for Papa Westray and Westray. Then it lands in Papa Westray,
drops off any passengers destined for that island and picks up any passengers
traveling to Westray and Kirkwall. Next, it flies those 80 or so
seconds to Westray, drops off its passengers and picks up
any final travelers headed for Kirkwall. This way, it aggregates the cumulative
demand of two islands onto one flight, allowing for operations to each more regularly
than if they both had dedicated flights. Altogether, this means the only people
that might take the flight exclusively between Papa Westray and Westray
are aviation enthusiasts and tourists who make the pilgrimage to fly
on the world's shortest commercial flight. Tom, however, is returning to Kirkwall. - Sam, thank you so much. There's a link to Sam's channel,
Wendover Productions, in the description and on screen.
And sure enough, the plane spent two minutes on the ground
while one passenger disembarked and the pilot filled out some paperwork,
and then we were off in the air again.
Tom Scott and Wendover crossover is not something I expected to see.
Man that's a short hop. I can hear it now: "And here we have Captain Richard Brownstein, who has recorded two hundred and fifty three thousands flights with this specific model of airplane."
All I can add to this is that I know what that red thing on the right side of the dash on the plane is, a Scott single gas monitor, for presumably carbon monoxide.
As soon as he said doing a voice over about airplanes I was like haha sounds like Wendover.
Little did I know they knew each other.
Do you have to request permission to land before taking off?
Huge fan of both Tom Scott and Wendover!
Yeah I still don't get why the flight exists. Tickets are so expensive so no one would choose to take the flight if they actually had to pay what it costs. Why do taxes have to pay to subsidize flights for people just because they don't want to take the less convenient ferry?
was it good?