Long-distance travel has come a long way

I SEE that the Australian airline Qantas is to begin non-stop, 20-hour flights from Sydney to London, in late 2025.

This is amazing when you consider that it is only 119 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air, motor-powered plane, on December 17, 1903.

Prior to this and for a long time afterwards, the only way to get to Australia was by sea, taking many months, with all the hardships and dangers that this entailed, and no guarantee of getting there.

As late as 1957, before affordable flights and routes were established, my family and my 16-year-old self emigrated to New Zealand.

It took five and a half weeks on a crowded old immigrant ship called the Captain Cook.

Meals had to be served in two sittings as there were over 1,100 of us. We were in the second sitting so it meant that all the best seats, in the lounge and on deck, were taken by those from the first sitting before we finished our meal.

The ship had a chequered history, having been launched in the 1920s as the SS Letitia, renamed several times and served during the Second World War, when there were collisions with other ships which sunk with many fatalities, incidents of running aground, breakdowns and fires. They didn’t tell us about that before we sailed on it.

I have relatives, neighbours and friends, who fly backward and forward to Australia and New Zealand as casually as we might hop on a bus.

My cousin flew over here from NZ for a job interview on a Friday, got the job, flew back home, packed up, left his house in the care of a friend, flew back here with his wife and started work by Wednesday the next week. The world is truly getting smaller.

P Collins Bristol