Speed Distance Time: a movie about Charles Lindbergh

Last night I was watching the movie The Spirit of St. Louis about Charles Lindbergh and his flight from New York to Paris, France. Lindbergh was the first to make this non-stop flight. He did it in 1927.

In the movie, Lindbergh does a test flight from San Diego California to St. Louis Missouri in 14 hours and 25 minutes. The distance from Ryan Field in San Diego to Lambert Field in St. Louis is 1557 miles.

What was his speed? (coded answer below)

(There are two kinds of miles, "Statute Miles" and "Nautical Miles." This problem uses statute miles, these are the common miles of 5280 feet. I will make a separate post about nautical miles.

A way to remember 5280 is "Five tomatoes - five two eight oh")

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Hints: you have to divide the distance (1557 miles) by the time, 14 hours and 25 minutes. 25 minutes is 25/60 hours. If you have an ordinary, 4-function calculator, you can divide 25 by 60, write it down, then add to 14 and write that down. You will get 14.dddd where dddd stands for digits. Then divide the distance by the decimal time you just wrote down.

Another way to do it is to clear the memory (use MC if you have it, if not, press MRC twice). Then do 25 [divided by] 60 [=] and you will get a decimal, larger than 0.4 and less than 0.5. Then press [+] 14  [=]. You will get 14.dddd where dddd stands for digits. Now press [M+] to store in memory. An M will appear to indicate the number is stored. Then enter the miles and press [divided by] MR or MRC once and you will get the answer; you divided by the time stored in memory. This may seem a tedious process, but if you practice it, you will find it pretty quick.

In 1927, planes flew at about 100 miles per hour. Modern planes are much faster. It took Lindbergh more than 14 hours to do a flight that takes about 3 hours today.

If you have a scientific calculator, the calculation is much simpler. If you need help, write to me using margolis.stephen at Yahoo.com, tell me what kind of scientific calculator you have, and I will tell you how to do the calculation.

Use the @ sign in your email, the "at" is put in above to discourage spam.
washington.george at yahoo.com means washington.george@yahoo.com

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Coded answer: Bar uhaqerq rvtug zvyrf cre ubhe.

This answer is in Rot13 code. To decode, do a copy operation on the coded answer, go to Rot13.com, paste the coded answer in, and press cypher to decode .Link to rot13

If you prefer manual decode, you can use:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm