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The U.S. Canada organization that defends our airspace, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), monitors Santa Claus on December 25th.
Here is what they know:
Santa and Amazon
Santa
Santa specialist Larry Silverberg (a mechanical engineering and aerospace professor at North Carolina State University) and others have added to the NORAD research. As the first person to attend a 6-month visting scholar program at Santa’s workshop, Dr. Silverberg described the “advanced technology” of the sleigh:
Meanwhile, other researchers have added the following:
- Stops: Aged 0-14 years old, the number of children in the world is in the vicinity of 2 billion. However, Santa will not visit all of these young people. It depends on their religion and who has been good. That brings the total down to somewhere between 536 million (Washington Post) and 160 million (depending on your source). Also debatable, we could be talking about 91 million homes.
- Speed: To make all of his stops, Santa’s sleigh has to move at 650 miles a second. (The typical reindeer can run, at most, 15 miles an hour.) Moving so fast, Santa’s sleigh meets such huge air resistance that, at the worst, he could burst into flame. At best, he is creating countless sonic booms.
- Time: Assuming the sleigh moves from east to west (and including time zones in our calculations), Santa completes his deliveries in 31 hours.
Amazon
Equally amazing, the average Amazon driver does a whopping number of deliveries:. 
Having surpassed UPS and FedEx, Amazon is only behind the US Postal Service in package volume. For 2023, they project that they will have delivered 5.9 billion packages:
Our Bottom Line: Transportation Infrastructure
All deliveries, whether from Amazon, UPS or the US Postal Service, depend on the U.S. transportation infrastructure. At first composed of rough roads and waterways when Ben Franklin ran the USPS, it gradually acquired canals and then railroads. We thought that air transit provided the last links.
But now we have drones…
And Santa’s flying sleigh.
My sources and more: Our past sources for today’s post included a BBC More or Less podcast, an MIT estimate of Santa’s deliveries, The Daily Mail. and The Washington Post. More recently, we looked at WSJ, NORAD, and Amazon. Please note that, for delivery people, I did confirm the accuracy of my numbers. Also, today’s “Bottom Line” was in a previous econlife post.
