No, you’re not going crazy, the current season of Game of Thrones does seem to exist in a dimension where time and space are incredibly flexible. Case-in-point, many viewers of last week’s episode, “Beyond the Wall,” were flummoxed when both a raven and a dragon flew what had to be thousands of miles in very little time (the director of the episode at least acknowledged this). Well, if that was you, you were right: we did the math, and either ravens are magically fast, or Daenery’s dragons fly as fast as Boeing 777s.
In the video above, we look to maps of Westeros, the passage of time in the episode, and the top speeds of bird species in order to get a better idea of flight velocity. First of all, Dragonstone, where Dany resides probably wearing a killer outfit, and Eastwatch, just over the wall from where burly dude throw rocks at zombies, are — conservatively — over 1,500 miles apart. This is the minimum distance a raven and dragon would have to cover.
The horizontal flight velocity for the species of birds called ravens tops out at around 50 miles per hour (80kph). Dividing 1,500 miles by that velocity yields over 30 hours of travel time, more time than passes in the episode, leaving Dany’s dragons no time to reach Jon and all that snow up north. We have to choose another bird.
The bird with the highest horizontal flight velocity, on average, is the awesomely named gyrfalcon. If GoT‘s ravens could manage this quickness — 70 mile per hour — it would leave just three hours for Dany to get back to Eastwatch after receiving the message. Take all this together and you get an incredible average velocity for a dragon, but you’ll have to watch the video above for the full breakdown!
Images: HBO
Need More Thrones Before the Season Finale?
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- A history of the “Dragonpit” and the demise of dragons.
- Recapping last week’s frightening and frigid episode.
