Originally Posted by
WHBM
Looking at the Flight link above, there were several prizes for the "most ingenious" method, not connected with time taken. Would be interesting to know what the winners of those actually did.
There was a later single attempt at this probably in the late 1960s when on the Saturday evening BBC teatime show they had someone do the same run, in a Hunter (and bits at both ends) within the duration of the program, which was probably one hour.
I don't recall the route, but do remember that to while away some of the time they had a guy who was going for the world record for the number of times he could jump into and out of a pair of underpants in two minutes, and one of the show presenters competed alongside him. Talk about trivialising the main subject matter.
There was also one on Noel Edmond's 'Late Late Breakfast Show' in the '80s between Biggin and Beauvais or vice versa. One of the competitors was Niki Lauda in his Falcon 20.
Some of the civilian aircraft inbound to Biggin were doing letdowns in about 300ft cloud ceiling which might not be classed as legal nowadays.