Flying

 Interesting Facts - Passengers aboard Loganair Flight LM711, which travels 1.7 miles between the Scottish islands of Westray and Papa Westray, are airborne very briefly. On a good day, the world’s shortest commercial flight takes less than a minute — as little as 53 seconds, in fact. There’s no co-pilot, no lavatory, and only eight passengers aboard the Britten-Norman BN-2 Islander aircraft. Tickets for the journey, which is made just two or three times a day, cost roughly $22. Both Westray and Papa Westray are part of the Orkney archipelago, a sparsely populated set of islands that have proved popular with adventurous travelers in search of a scenic journey that happens to include a record-setting flight.

Most of the world’s other shortest flights are likewise between islands. Those who’d prefer not to take the hour-long ferry connecting the Greek isles of Karpathos and Kasos can instead fly between them in just five minutes. Meanwhile, passengers flying the 12 miles from Sint Maarten (one of the Netherlands’ constituent countries) to Anguilla (a British Overseas Territory) can expect to be in the air for closer to 10 minutes.