Standing in Heathrow on my first trip to the UK in 1998, I stopped and looked at the arrival and departure boards. Flights to Johannesburg, Tokyo, Peking, Sydney, San Francisco, Vancouver, etc. Sure, I'd been in enough US airports that served a lot of destinations, including overseas, but I had never seen anything like the diversity of locations Heathrow serves--with a number of them at great distances.

Keeping in mind that most American passengers take domestic flights with a connection that breaks up the transcontinental distance, a seven or eight-hour flight from London to the East Coast probably does seem like a "short hop" to some of our UK FTers. . .