World's shortest international flight will be just eight minutes

The eight minute trip is just 20km long. Photo / 123RF

A commercial airline is about to start offering the shortest international flight in the world.

The eight minute trip is just 20km long, from St Gallen in Switzerland to Friedrichshafen in Germany, and it literally goes from one side of a lake to the other.

It's claimed the top stop from a 50km flight between the Austrian capital, Vienna, and the Slovakian city of Bratislava, which took just 10 minutes.

It seems a little excessive, given you can travel the same route on a train in just over an hour, and as such it's no longer operational.

These micro-flights seem ridiculous to Australian travellers, who can be in the air for four and a half hours from Perth to Brisbane and still be in the same country.

And if you think about it, even the shortest flight between capital cities, Sydney to Canberra, is still a respectable 55 minutes.

It takes an hour and a half to fly between regional centres such as Mt Isa and Townsville, or 65 minutes to get from Mildura to Adelaide.

But due to its population density, Europe's penchant for micro-flights is second to none.

The continent's shortest domestic flight lasts just 47 seconds. Yes, you read that correctly.

Operated by Loganair, the flight is officially 120 seconds in duration, but under ideal conditions it can be completed in less than a minute.

It's between two villages called Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, which are separated by a distance of two and a half kilometres as the crow flies.

To put that into perspective, the distance of the flight is shorter than the length of the runway at Edinburgh Airport, the nearest international terminal.

It certainly beats a blustery 59-minute ferry ride between the two, in the North Sea.

As for the flight between St Gallen and Friedrichshafen, the idea is to connect passengers to the larger airport at Cologne.

It's expected to cost A$60 a ticket, which nearly makes it worthwhile for the novelty alone.