* Posts by John Robson

5178 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2008

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Solution desperately seeking problem

"If you already have a car then swapping it for an EV is unlikely to be economic."

Really - why?

Is that because you are comparing the cost of a second hand car with that of a new EV? It doesn't necessarily even add up more expensive then...

In my case I got rid of my ~10 year old 100k miles ICE car and went full battery EV for basically the same annual cost (within £60 on a cost of £3600 calculated over 15 years of receipts).

Granted my annual cost is low at least in part because the motability lease scheme is extraordinarily good value, but an ICE vehicle on the scheme would have cost me even more (as would be expected going from an old car to a new one), such that I wouldn't have chosen to spend the extra money.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: All very well but

Ah, all that stop start traffic... regen isn't perfectly efficient, but it's alot less bad for an EV than an ICE.

I used to commute 700 miles a week, which was just a smidge over a tank.

At the time there were no EVs that would have done my commute, now there are plenty, and none of them would ever need to go to a public charger - they'd just charge overnight at home.

If I was particularly conservative I might put an extension cable out of the window at the office (or get an actual charger installed in the car park - away from the building, so that it wasn't where others would choose to park).

It would have been significantly less time out of my week to charge overnight than to visit a petrol station.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: One piece of the puzzle

Literally no-one is proposing a mega watt class home charger though.

7kW charges at ~28mph, so whilst you are in bed (assuming 8 hours) each and every day you can add more than 200 miles of range without resorting to high powered shennaigans.

Substation upgrades might eventually be needed, but a sensible standard for grid manipulation of charging loads will stave that off for a good while I expect.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: There still remains......

Yes.

Keep researching fusion, but get thorium running.

Preferably in container sized units.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: There still remains......

I have made the point many times that the thermal efficiency of a large engine is far superior to that of a typical small engine.

So even if you used petrol to generate the electricity and then sent it over the grid... you can still end up with more miles to the gallon.

The point here was that you aren't filling up with several MW of useful power, you are filling up with miles.

In the EV world at 350kW that's ~1400 mph filling rate without needing supervision.

In the dino juice world...

Pumps deliver something like 40l/minute, 2400l/hour - 45mpg is just under 12mpl, ~ 28,000 mph, but need constant supervision.

Ok, so that's 20 times faster... But 90+% of vehicle charging isn't happening at rapid chargers - it happens with zero time cost (overnight at home).

Sample size of one: I use rapid chargers for just two of the journeys that I make regularly, one journey is made once per year, and needs one partial charge for the round trip (unless I stay somewhere I can use a three pin plug overnight), the other needs ~160 miles of rapid charging each way, with ~140 miles coming from overnight charging at either end.

So out of my typical 12k miles/year, only 1k (250kWh) is done using rapid chargers.

8% of my charging is rapid... the other 92% is effectively zero time.

So that's <1 hour of charging (assuming 350kW and 4m/kWh) per year

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Batteries are dead

So what is your car allowance, and how much do you spend on fuel.

Because you might find that the sums aren't as bad as you think.

I shifted from buying my own car to a lease, and that was only possible because the costs of running an EV are much lower (additionally because motability offers very good value). But that's from buying cars with 80k+ on the clock to getting a new car on a lease without a change in cost.

The challenge is that 400 mile range is actually on the limit of current vehicles.

Personally I see 200 miles (real world) as a sweet spot - a 350kW charging capability (now being widely deployed in the UK, the electric highway is in new ownership) would mean that a 6 minute break every couple of hours is all that would be needed.

That's probably good enough for all but the most extreme road warriors.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Range

Have a think about how often you need that - as an EV user I use rapid chargers a handful of times a year. Because I'm not tied to the vehicle whilst it charges... it just doesn't matter for 90%+ of miles, and 99%+ of journeys.

Personally I'd quite like a few more miles than the 140 I currently get, but it doesn't need to be much. The trick is to make the 10/20%-80% range sufficient that I want to stop and grab a cup of tea/mug of coffee and get rid of the last one.

That's ~140 miles (a stop and stretch every couple of hours is good for concentration)... So a 200 mile battery would fit that bill completely (140miles/70% (i.e. 10%-80%)). At 4m/kWh that would be 35kWh needed, if you want that in 10-15 minutes then you are looking at 140kW to 210 kW. Oh, look currently chargers are putting out 350kW (i.e. a six minute charge - just about time to go and grab a cup of beverage and lose the last one).

Driving an EV means you think about fuel in a different way, it's not a hassle to fill up, because it very rarely involves any time spent next to the car.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: A power station at each garage ?

But you don't need a generator on site. We have this thing called electricity, and we can move it around the country very economically, and with very little loss, using these things called cables.

Given that there are ~32.7 million cars in the UK (2021), doing an average of 7400 miles (2019) at a reasonable 4m/kWh that's 60TWh, or a bit under 7GW (90+% of which won't be needed at service stations of course).

You might want a small substation.

You could better posit the potential benefits of a more distributed grid and install SMRs on such sites... They already have pretty good round the clock use, and therefore passive security, they are distributed through the country, with a bias towards higher population densities, but are generally outside those population centres.

An SMR on each of the 158 UK motorway service stations would only need to be 45MWe (and they are anything up to 300MWe) to completely cover all car transport needs.

Alternatively.... we installed 45GW of renewable generation in the decade between 2010 and 2020 - albeit that will be the easiest 45GW, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that we could install another 7 over the course of the next two decades (i.e. a decade after fossil fuelled cars are no longer available new - a reasonable, but accelerated, replacement cycle).

If you did go the (crazy) route of having a purely petroleum based power source for your EV fleet...

Then you get a higher thermal efficiency (larger engine), and therefore probably more miles per gallon than you would get in a dino juice car anyway. Additionally the waste heat can be used to heat the service station, and the exhaust can be easily controlled and processed with devices which don't have the compromises associated with packaging that treatment into a car - and those gasses aren't being released into the centre of towns where there are people breathing them directly (i.e. it's less bad in terms of location as well)

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

John Robson Silver badge

Have text large enough to read for someone with gaze stability issues, and I end up with only 44 lines of text on my terminal on a 32" screen.

I'd love to be able to cope with only the two screens I used to use, believe me.

John Robson Silver badge
WTF?

Are you trolling or have you just completely missed the point - you can still use the port for literally anything else *whilst* also using it for charging.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: eGPU maybe

Being fast doesn't help in terms of powering more screens.

I have an intel MBP with an eGPU, not for the GPU horsepower, but because it can drive four external monitors, which gives me a 5 monitor setup, all on pole mounts (even the laptop is pole mounted).

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How come ...

Not really - PCIe is ridiculously fast, and the speed of memory on GPUs is also insane.

The fact that that connection is now available externally is a bonus. Port memory between your machines as needed, buy memory and use it with your next three laptops?

Sounds like a win to me...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How come ...

Well if the GPU disconnects I assume that the OS will lose anything that was running on its memory anyway.

I'm merely ditching the actual GPU component of the device and using an external PCIe connection.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

Well the original post was complaining that he couldn't do fourteen things with the two ports, despite one port being sufficient for all of them.

I also don't upgrade monitors often, but I still get 3 USB ports, SD reader, ethernet and HDMI out of one port, whilst still using that same port for power delivery.

And that HDMI lets me use my old monitors quite happily (I only have two VGA monitors left, and they are on server duty, the only places where I still have VGA only devices).

So it's not a replacement, it's a different connector - one that should outlast this laptop, and will still work with the next one, and possibly the next...

It gives you a single cable docking solution - yes it costs a couple of cups of coffee to get, but it'll last longer than any other docking solution in the past.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How come ...

I am still certain that RAM will soon be available as a TB plugin.

After all both intel and AMD are already sharing GPU memory, and TB exports PCIe lanes directly, so it really ought to be possible.

Thunderbolt for storage is already faster than you need, and ethernet, even multi gigabit ethernet is easily handled.

But *now* we're finally at a point where the count of ports matters, potentially, sometimes.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

So you have bought a USB-C keyboard without a hub built in, and a USB-C monitor that doesn't support power delivery (which is the single most obvious thing for a monitor to support, though I'd suggest that it should also pull out a few USB ports at least).

It's almost as if you didn't actually look at what you were spending your money on. I price up a laptop, and include the price of a case, and historically the cost of a docking station as well.

Now I don't need to include a docking station ever again, because it's a £20 dongle that I can keep from one machine to the next.

In terms of throwing one in the box - absolutely the power bricks should break out HDMI/USB-A/Ethernet, even if it's an optional* power brick, but I don't know of *any* manufacturer that does that.

The shift to USBc has taken quite a while. It took me a long time to start to move over, but having done so just before lockdown (new machine from work) I can really see the advantages that a single connector gives you. The throughput capacity of the connector is also staggering, and it should therefore be able to survive for a decent number of years.

It's also supposed to be more robust than many of the connectors it replaces, and I can believe that, although I don't have enough experience to confirm or refute the claim.

The machine gives you connectivity - probably more than you will ever need. But you do need to make sure that the things you want to connect are appropriately adapted. In the same way that I need to ensure that my washing machine isn't plumbed into the gas supply, and that it's drain is actually put into a trap, and that the electrical supply is appropriately fused, and switched in a position that is accessible.

* The option would be a choice between this and a smaller/lighter brick without the ports.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Seriously?

And one that is easily accomplished - have a monitor that supports PD (because either it's a USB-C native monitor and should support PD or it's not and you need a doodad anyway).

The difference between a doodad and a doodad that supports PD is virtually nothing.

I also doubt that you tote around that monitor, so just leave the dongle there, and you have your power, monitor and anything else already plugged in with just one cable to connect when you get back to your desk - I've spent years plugging in half a dozen cables after each meeting, or having a expensive docking station that only supports one model of laptop, so gets thrown out with each update.

Now we have the ease of single cable docking, with the confidence that our next machine will use the same cable and everything will work, we don't need to replace the whole desktop setup every time.

I'm not a great fan of toting hubs around either, but I'd rather carry something the size of four pens than a power brick. Although I've mentioned elsewhere, I think power bricks should come with HDMI/USB-A/Ethernet by default now.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How?

Nope - no confusion at all, but a recognition that desktop class performance no longer requires a sizable power bill.

The M1 is a very capable processor, and will burn through most tasks that your desktop workhorse accomplishes very capably.

What it will never be is a racehorse - it's not going to replace a full tower top end, wannabe server, workstation (as opposed to a desktop), but noone has pretended it will - that's for the next couple of generations of chips if the rumours are anything close to accurate.

95% of the time it's a computer, the remaining 5% it's a computer I can take with me and carry on working. As opposed to your approach where 95% of the time it's a computer, the other 5% of the time it's nothing, because you now can't work when you visit the office...

That's no reason not to make it a comfortable computer for the 95%, monitors, keyboard, mouse/trackpad/trackball, external storage, high speed networking...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Traditional Apple.

It might not be a space thing (we all know there is plenty of space) - it might be a case of limited lanes to expose.

The Mac Mini only has two, although it does also have USB ports, HDMI and ethernet... so there really ought to be scope for adding more ports to the laptops (even if they are only USB3 over USB-C)

John Robson Silver badge

Re: eGPU maybe

Not at the moment, but I suspect it will come (maybe with the next hardware revision).

Of course the dock will probably still work fine, it just won't be a connected GPU.

John Robson Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Daisy Chain monitors?

Yeah - except that as far as I could tell when I was trying this on my previous MBP apple just doesn't support it.

Boot linux on the same hardware and daisy chained display port monitors worked fine, but it didn't work using MacOS.

Stupid stupid stupid...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How?

Why?

Because for the 5% of the time spent on the road... it's still basically a desktop 95% of the time, and it is a pretty powerful one at that. Built in UPS, decent raw compute power.

Why wouldn't you get a USB-C dock that will let you use the machine in comfort, and will work with your next machine as well, and the loaner you get from IT for <insert reason>, and your personal machine...

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

I'm only using two - and only use one when I visit an office (the eGPU isn't really a portable device)

Both my eGPU and my USB adaptor (which also gives me hdmi and ethernet ports) are individually capable of powering the laptop - the eGPU uses its own power brick, the USB adaptor has a USB-C power in port, so would use the laptop power brick.

You don't need to dedicate a port to a charger - that's one of the good things about USB-c, it can do multiple things at the same time.

You want a monitor (hdmi?) and a couple of USB type A ports (three to have a spare for a thumb drive) and power delivery... Well that's all handled by my USB adaptor, which was ~£20 and works on a variety of difference devices.

To my mind Apple missed a trick by not putting a USB-A port, an HDMI port and an ethernet port into their power bricks - make them a USB-C hub that happens to have a PSU in it as well - but then I'm not aware of anyone else who has done that either.

I'd have liked to retain magsafe, because that's frankly a brilliant piece of design, solving a real problem, but complaining that ports that can easily do everything you want strikes me that you haven't actually looked for a solution, or even investigated what the ports are capable of.

John Robson Silver badge

"I want to plug into a monitor and a PSU - and now I have no more ports? Forget it. I'm holding out for the next one."

Ok, so that's taken one of your ports, and you also have ethernet, sd, and multiple USB-A ports open as well...

What did you want the second port for?

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

My MBP has four ports - One is used for the eGPU, which supports power delivery (and is used for that), another is used for the dongle that does Ethernet, 3*USB A, SD cards, and also an HDMI port if I'm out and about, and also supports power delivery (and I use that when visiting an office).

One of those USB A ports feeds the usb hubs on my monitors, the other feeds a hub on the desk, and the third feeds a dedicated audio interface.

The other two aren't used.

So why exactly can't you use power delivery?

John Robson Silver badge

25% more mass, 25% less battery capacity, and a substantially less efficient processor - so you aren't really comparing apples with apples there are you.

Find one with comparable battery life, and performance, and weight and you might start to make a point, but I suspect you won't get that within anything like a reasonable budget

John Robson Silver badge

Re: How come ...

There will be soon - it will be the M1.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: A Mixed Bag for me

But neither is a wintel laptop much good for long battery life without crippling back injury.

Horses for courses.

If I was developing across multiple platforms then I'd be running anything I wanted on the desktop/laptop and have hardware instances of the major target platforms.

I used to have three machines on my desk - Linux, MacOS, Windows. I has x2vnc set up, so I could seamlessly move the cursor between them, made for an easy experience between the three - I don't think I'd bother any more, just screen share - if I really needed low level access then a KVM on one of my screens, or an IP KVM of some description (the RasPi based ones look pretty good).

John Robson Silver badge

"The fish-microwaving maniac is an antisocial psychopath with scant regard for the wellbeing (or sanity) of her co-workers, who should be locked up in a basement stationery cupboard for her own good."

Or someone who simply hasn't done it before or had it done in an office they are in.

It's decades since I made the mistake of grabbing last night's leftovers for my lunch without thinking - and it's not a mistake I'll make again, nor will anyone I worked with at the time.

John Robson Silver badge

Personally I'd go for the ultrawide monitor. It's a far more elegant solution than multiple displays anyway,

You're one of those people who like constantly rearranging windows are you?

I used to use ion3 window manager because it, well, managed my windows.

With my current 5 monitor layout I again don't have to arrange windows, I just choose which display they should be on (everything maximised or fullscreened, text size ~175-200% in general, else I would probably only have the three)

NASA's InSight lander expected to survive most of summer before choking to death on Martian dust

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Excellent engineering

*Primary* mission is a year, that's what got the bulk of the funding.

A fairly small additional cost (in finances and mass) gives us massive secondary research.

Court kills FTC, US states' antitrust complaints against trillion-dollar Facebook

John Robson Silver badge

Re: I have to agree

"Then you add the cost of adding a full retail licence to a bare pc and you see why its really sold with it."

That's the anti trust step right there...

A discount I can deal with, the fact that it apparently doesn't save the companies any money not *not* ship windows.... implies that they are getting it for free or with an actual kickback.

Most people wouldn't notice what the OS was, so long as it has a reasonably familiar UI, and either plays games (mostly pretty good cross platform support nowadays) or runs a word processor (which seem to be focussed on being browser based now).

Tesla shows off the AI supercomputer training what it hopes will one day be an actual self-driving car

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Testing Neural Networks

So you've taken your driving test - how do we know how you'll respond in fifteen years time to a situation that wasn't in your test?

We don't. But at least with self driving vehicles every vehicle will be able to learn from the outcome, whether good or bad.

When a car can pass a driving test (things like manoeuvres are already basically trivial) then it can be let loose on the road - it will still be learning, and improving, but it will rapidly be doing millions of times the mileage that a typical learner (because you're still learning after you passed the test) will be able to.

At the moment Tesla is already learning on the road - the autopilot is recording and deciding, even when the car is in manual control... So the ability to beam back "Hey, I'd have done this differently" absolutely will be improving the situation.

Backblaze, long a champion of home-grown hardware, succumbs to the lure of commodity servers

John Robson Silver badge

Fair enough

"“So, no, we don’t think Storage Pods are dead,” he concluded. “They’ll just have a diverse group of storage server friends to work with.”"

That's a reasonable position to take...

Hubble memory errors persist despite NASA booting long-idle backup payload computer

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Have they tried

It's something you avoid doing in space - if it doesn't boot then you're completely out of options.

Of course the advantage of redundant equipment is that they can boot up the second compiter whilst still talking to the first.

Google: About that whole getting rid of third-party cookies thing – we're gonna need another year or so

John Robson Silver badge

Cookies...

The only thing that this means is that they have another way of tracking everyone :(

Currently running side by side to verify that it's "better" :(

Bet they still can't sling an ad that's actually relevant though.

Mysterious ‘security update’ to Google Drive cloud storage locker will break links to some files

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Epic Dodgey

Took me a long while to click it...

Flexispot Deskcise Pro V9: Half desk, half exercise bike, and you're all sweaty. How much does it cost again?

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Had one for ages.

And get a gel tractor saddle - your nether regions really dont need to be brutalised to exercise.

Except that if you have a very soft saddle then the pressure gets applied to places it shouldn't rather than your sit bones taking your weight and not more sensitive areas.

Of course if you really want comfort then don't bother with a saddle, go recumbent.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: What - no generator?

Given that a reasonably fit person (which you would be after not too long) can generate 100W for an extended period...

It's not a completely daft idea.

The real problem is that this isn't a recumbent design, which would be superior is basically every respect...

Hubble Space Telescope sails serenely on in safe mode after efforts to switch to backup memory modules fail

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking...

"SpaceX suits are not EVA suits. They are flight suits that have to stay connected. Plus the Dragon was not designed to allow exiting in a full NASA EVA suit."

Pretty sure I had that covered when I said they didn't have the EVA suits or airlock ;)

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Wishful thinking...

If it is fully decommissioned I can see Musk using Hubble recovery as a starship test flight.

That would be spectacular. But what would you launch in its place? A more modern version of the same? Something with even bigger mirrors (either a 8.5m one to sit inside the starship fairing or multiple 8m hexagons to be assembled in orbit?)

The spectral capability of Hubble (particularly IR IIRC) can't be reproduced on the ground - it's not a matter of adaptive optics, but of atmospheric absorption.

Given current hardware, what would you add to a Hubble 2.0?

Or would we be better off skipping Hubble 2.0 and going straight to a moon based telescope? Musk is getting perilously close to being able to put a significant amount of stuff there after all (and by the time a Hubble recovery trip could be made)

John Robson Silver badge

Re: And shut the door on your way out ...

And a convenient space fulcrum.

John Robson Silver badge

Wishful thinking...

SpaceX have the delta V and life support available on the dragon

What they don't have is the arm (though I am sure one could be deployed in the trunk) or the airlock or the EVA suits.

They could go all gemini and just vent the atmosphere until they get back in, but that doesn't seem like a particularly likely scenario.

Poltergeist attack could leave autonomous vehicles blind to obstacles – or haunt them with new ones

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Automation

So you want to issue driving licenses based on the ability to hold a conversation?

I'll wait until the autonomous systems have passed a driving test - until then I'll still be driving, and taking advantage of all the assistive features I can - whether those are things like ABS to assist me in "Oh shit" moments, or things like lane keeping and ACC that help me on a normal journey.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Automation

Yes - but it's not the condition for which most current ACC systems are useful. It's bit like complaining that your toaster doesn't make coffee in the morning.

ACC is there so that in dense traffic you can set the cruise control and if the vehicle in front slows by a bit you don't have to keep changing the CC settings, it's adaptive.

I have mine set to max distance and don't find people pulling in front of me more than they would if I was either controlling that distance myself or had it set to a closer distance. Nor does it slam the brakes on when they inevitably do so at a motorway junction.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Automation

"Dials (and knobs, switches and buttons) are easy compared to the multi-function touch displays much liked these days. I suggest if you are finding them difficult you may wish to assess whether you are actually fit to drive.'

I agree with your disdain for touchscreens as an in car interface.

However the closest I have ever come to another vehicle on the road was twenty year ago when I glanced down to grab the heater control. Massive great dial, so took no more than .1-.2 seconds to glance, but in that moment the vehicle in front started an emergency stop. I stopped with about 6" to spare, and was then overtaken by a small blue cloud that used to be part of my rear tyres.

My comment that driving was difficult wasn't that I found it particularly so - but that in general operating lethal machinery in public is difficult. The levels of concentration required to do it properly are much, much higher than most motorists manage. Reducing that level slightly, and reducing the time your eyes are away from the road at all, is a good thing.

Since I became disabled I have an additional cognitive load to deal with, and the aids are therefore even more important to me, previously they were useful gimmicks (i.e. I could do without them, but they were still an aid), now they are significantly important.

As a completely non driver aid example:

Keyless entry for a car. I had it, thought is was a fun gimmick, used it anyway. Replaced car, didn't have it any more. No big deal.

Then became disabled.

So now I come out of the supermarket, have to fish around in the bag for the key, open the boot, put the key back in the bag, put shopping and wheelchair in the boot, stagger round the car, fish the key out again, unlock the driver's door, put key back, get in, get key out for a third time, put key in ignition.

Because every action requires both hands, I can't just keep the key out - and suddenly keyless entry is no longer a gimmick but a major feature.

John Robson Silver badge

Re: Automation

"No my disdain is for those aids that don't actually aid me,"

And since they don't help you they can't possibly help anyone else.

Remember when people didn't trust seatbelts, airbags, ABS... because they were potentially dangerous in some rare condition, or they interfered with you "driving" the vehicle.

">And as for the significant number of cars that will brake *for you* if they detect that you came off the throttle and went onto the brake very suddenly

Actually, a more important consideration is detecting that the car in front has started to slow and that you need to slow and potentially slam your brakes on."

Erm - that would be the adaptive cruise control technology you were just slamming - but in a state where it can't be turned off and is called collision avoidance.

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

John Robson Silver badge

Re: What is an OS for?

And that's why the default window manager is usually fine. Gnome or KDE I don't care. On a lower powered box XFCE. Not a problem.

I used to use ion3 when I was doing more software dev than I do now.

Currently stuck with whatever apple throws at me, which is very annoying in certain edge cases, but generally works well enough.

Haven't done any serious work on anything from Redmond in a long while now. And that was on stuff that other people looked after, I basically needed something to run a set of shells.

Tim Cook: Sideloading is a disaster and proposed App Store reforms would harm user privacy and security

John Robson Silver badge

Re: User's best interest?

"Their bandwidth bill will be fine."

As a company with a literal* mountain of cash... they would also be "fine" if they gave away their latest iShiny.

I don't expect them to do that though.

* If they ever actually converted it to cash

Updating in production, like a boss

John Robson Silver badge

Re: The random expiry time

"The banking auditors were due to arrive that day at 1200 for the annual review"

That would explain business class flights.