Originally Posted by
Narrow Seat
A couple we know who are highly educated and professional were telling me about their upcoming trip to Thailand from New York City. They had never flown internationally before. In the conversation, I made a comment about how tiring a trip like that would be because of the long flight. The wife looked perplexed and told me she did not know what I was talking about. She told because because they would be flying on a jet the trip would be short-- just a few hours. I told her a non-stop flight from JFK to Bangkok will be about 16 hours if there were a nonstop and up to 30 hours with a connection. They did not believe me until we looked it up online.
It would be kind of amusing if this sort of mistake ended up driving people's decisions about what class of service to fly. "Oh, it's only a few hours, so we'll just fly economy instead of PY or J. How bad can it be?"