Imperial Airways to Cape Town

Think

Starter

[22 September 2016]
Write

Activities

Imperial Airways Africa Timetable

The year is 1937 and you work for Imperial Airways. The company has just taken delivery of a small fleet of Short Empire Flying Boats, with a range of 1200 km and an average speed of 300 km/h.

Your job is to design a route so that Imperial Airways can use their Short Empire Flying Boats to fly paying customers from Southampton, United Kingdom to Cape Town, South Africa.


  • You need to decide as a class the maximum safe distance for a flight leg, the time taken to refuel the flying boats and the earliest and latest the planes can fly. In 1937 planes did have radar so would not fly at night!
  • Use Earth for web, with its measurement tool, to design your route. Each stop needs to be at a settlement with a significant population. Your route should be submitted as a single Google Earth Project with the placemarks in the correct order.
  • You should produce a route card that includes the start and end point of each leg of the journey, the distance, the duration and the take off and landing times.
Watch

Short Empire Flying Boats

[12 September 2007]
[18 September 2007]
Google Earth

Earth for web

Creating a Project

[28 November 2020]

Adding a placemark to a Project

[28 November 2020]

Using the Measure Tool

[28 November 2020]

Formatting a placemark

[28 November 2020]