Let’s Find Fitton!

Using references from several episodes of Cabin Pressure, I tried to locate where Fitton would be if it was a real place. Though some of the methods I used to narrow it down are fairly mathematical, some are just based on common sense or interpretation, so don’t take my word as gospel. I just did it for fun!

Our first reference is from episode 3.04, Ottery St. Mary. Martin has to drive a piano 200 miles from Fitton to a small village in Devon called Ottery St. Mary. A 200-mile linear radius of Ottery St. Mary yields thus:

Since Fitton is definitely not located in Ireland, Wales, or the English Channel, we can narrow it down to this:

We also know from 3.04 that Martin, Douglas, and Arthur drive to Ottery St. Mary via the A46, which I’ve outlined in green.

Using common sense, we can eliminate large portions of our shaded area simply due to the route that they took. A traveler to the west of the A46 would have taken the M5. Everything south of the A46 can also be eliminated, since that’s the direction they’re going to, not coming from.

Let’s narrow it down some more. We know from 1.01, Abu Dubai, that a fake-drunk Douglas might be mistaking Fitton’s landing runway for the A45. We can infer from that the Fitton’s airport is adjacent to, or at least very near to, the A45, which is highlighted in orange.

And we can narrow our field even further, eliminating virtually everything north of Leicester and east of the A1 (on the assumption that the A45 could be mistaken for Fitton Airfield).

We know from 3.03, Newcastle, that the flight time from Fitton to Birmingham, where GERTI stops because of “a little fire” in the galley, is about 7 minutes. Therefore, we can eliminate everything too east or north of Birmingham (as well as Birmingham itself), since GERTI would be flying north-northeast.

Unfortunately, there are no more points of reference that could narrow it down from here, at least not that I’m aware of. I personally like to place Fitton between Coventry and Birmingham, roundabout the purple circle, but it is really entirely up to your imagination!:

About some of the references I didn’t use:

I didn’t use the 25-minute flight time from Fitton to Newcastle because there were too many variables involved, most notably air speed.

And I didn’t use the reference from Johannesburg about flying “200 miles southwest to Paris, and you fly 300 miles northeast [to Barrow-in-Furness]” because they couldn’t have been originating from anywhere within Britain. To be honest, I think that must have been a goof or my understanding is just incorrect–there’s no place from which those directions would make sense.

Post Info

Posted on Wednesday 11 April 2012.

8 years ago.

Notes: 635