A supersonic airliner like “Concorde” flies at twice the speed of sound. A passenger can leave London at noon and arrive in New York at ten o’clock that same morning! There is a five-hour time difference between the two cities and Concorde can fly the Atlantic in only three hours, that evening the passenger will feel it is time to go to bed when it is only six o’clock. The evening will only just be beginning. Airlines pilots suffer from this very much. It may be in the middle of the night in Hong Kong but their stomachs are still on London time, where it is dinner time. Pilots and other airline crew have to adjust to constant change in time. That is why they often look fifty years old when they are only forty. This adjustment to sudden changes causes all sorts of problems. Businessmen who travel from one side of the world to the other in one day are told never to make important decisions in the first twenty-four hours after landing.

  Air travel is getting faster all the time. Engineers say that soon people will be “shot” to their destinations in huge rockets. These rockets will be able to carry 170passengers at a time. They will be shot high above the earth’s atmosphere and land on the other side of the earth forty-five minutes after “blast-off”. They will be able to cross the Pacific Ocean, from los angeles to Honolulu, in only eighteen minutes.

 

  Supersonic 超音速的

  Airliner 定期航班，客机

  Concorde 协和式飞机

  Atlantic 大西洋

  Destination 目的地

协和号超音速客机（已经停止商业运营）可以以两倍的音速飞机飞行。中午时分从伦敦出发的旅客到达纽约时会惊奇的发现：还是十点钟。伦敦和纽约有着四到五小时的时差，但协和号只要3个小时就可穿越大西洋！睡意十足的旅客当晚会在夜幕刚刚降临的六点钟去睡觉。时差对飞行员的影响最大，当他们在午夜飞抵香港时，他们的胃仍在中午时分的伦敦——饥肠辘辘！机组必须调整自己的生物钟。这就是为什么他们四十多岁的年龄却看起来有五十岁！对突然变化的调节造成了各种各样的问题。一个日期内，从世界此岸飞抵彼岸的商人们时刻记着：着陆后的24小时内不要作出任何重大决定。

空中之旅变得越来越快。工程师们说很快人类可以乘坐火箭“射”达目的地，更重要的是这些巨型火箭可以乘坐170名旅客。他们穿越大气层然后降落到地球的另外一端只需花费45分钟的时间。穿越浩瀚的太平洋，从洛杉矶到檀香山只要18分钟。