Santa's logistics challenge

THE WEEKLY LINK

Santa's logistics challenge

CHRIS CATTO-SMITH

Celebrating Christmas in a Buddhist country like Thailand requires advance planning, flexibility and a good imagination. At least that is what my daughter helped me understand on Christmas Eve (which was also a post-election holiday but she had to go to school on Christmas Day). With presents under the tree and unable to wait any longer, she told me sincerely it was tomorrow already and as we did not have a chimney Santa had already delivered the presents.

Who can argue with that logic?

The logistics of Santa's delivery service: An interesting study by Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy of the University College London computed certain delivery performance criteria for Santa's annual journey. Unfortunately, they based their calculations on an incorrect estimate of the numbers of Christians in the world.

The following, however, is believed to be a more accurate calculation. It is largely reprinted from a study by fellow consultant B.A. Robinson (of Ontario Consultants) and lists a number of assumptions:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children.

- Only one Santa distributes all of the gifts.

- Santa bypasses Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other non-Christian homes.

- The percentage of households in which there is at least one child who has been not naughty, but was nice is 90%.

Another underlying assumption is that Santa loads all of the presents before starting his journey. i.e. he does not return to the North Pole periodically to reload. Further calculations follow:

- Amount of time Santa spends per household, based on number of humans in the world: 6.0 billion comprising about two billion children.

- Percentage of children whose parents are Christian: 33%.

- Maximum number of children who might receive gifts: 667 million.

- Average number of children per household: 3.5.

- Number of destinations where Santa might deliver presents: 189 million.

- Number of destinations for Roman Catholic and Protestant families: 173 million. (The remainder are Eastern Orthodox locations, which Santa would handle in his second trip on Jan 5. The Eastern Orthodox church has not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar; the current gap between the calendars is 12 days and expanding).

- Total number of destinations where Santa delivers gifts: 156 million.

Santa cannot arrive until the children are asleep, so it is assumed he could start distributing presents in each time zone at perhaps 9 pm local time, finishing within an hour, before moving one time zone to the west. He could take longer in each time zone, as long as the entire job was finished comfortably before children woke up in the last zone. Assuming that the children sleep for seven hours, this gives him 31 hours (or a total of 1,860 minutes, or 111,600 seconds) to finish all deliveries.

The average number of homes he needs to visit per second is 1,398. This only gives him about 715 microseconds in which to decelerate the sleigh, land on the roof, walk to the chimney, slide down the chimney, distribute the presents and retrace his steps.

Now we need to make adjustments for special circumstances, among them:

- Santa's competitor Befana distributes gifts in Italy.

- Santa distributes some gifts on Boxing Day (Dec 26) to poor children in some British Commonwealth countries.

- Santa distributes some gifts in bulk quantities to orphanages, children's hospitals, etc, before Christmas.

- Sinter Klass distributes some gifts on Dec 5 to children in Belgium, Germany and Holland.

Then the average number of homes to visit per second on Christmas Eve is only perhaps 1,000. He would deliver gifts to about 500 million children.

Distance and speed: Assuming that Antarctica is essentially uninhabited, and ignoring the various inland lakes, the total inhabited land on earth is about 204 million square kilometres.

Assuming that the destinations are evenly distributed over the available land, the average distance between destinations is 1.26 km. Total distance travelled is 180 million km - a little longer than the distance from the earth to the sun! Over a 31-hour interval he needs to cover 1,600 km a second.

This is the average speed of the sleigh. Some time is required to decelerate the sleigh to a stop, for Santa to deliver the presents, for him to return to the sleigh and for the sleigh to accelerate to cruising speed. The latter would be on the order of 3,200 km a second. Santa would visit perhaps then need to visit 1,000 homes per second.

Potischman and Handy estimated that at a lower speed of 100 kilometres a second, air resistance would cause the lead reindeer to absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second and that the reindeer would be converted almost instantly to charcoal.

Summary: There are two logical explanations for these incredible figures:

- Santa Claus does not exist, except as a symbol or a myth. Some adults believe this, but most young children do not (including my daughter).

- Santa Claus has magical, near god-like powers. This is part of the Santa tradition: From his location at the North Pole, he sees the children when they are sleeping. He knows when they are awake. He knows they are bad and good.

So you'd better not shout, you'd better not cry. Santa does logistics better than anyone else in the sky! Happy Christmas.

Weekly Link is co-ordinated by Barry Elliott and Chris Catto-Smith CMC of the Institute of Management Consultants Thailand. It is intended to be an interactive forum for industry professionals; we welcome all input, questions, feedback and news at: BElliott@OliverWight-AP.com, cattoc@cmcthailand.org