The novel says that he owed his access to priority transport to a grateful Pentagon official.
Tom can't go to the hospital to see Genco because he's suppposed to leave that night for CA. He ends up leaving Sunday night.
Despite the arduous flight, Tom checks into his hotel, doesn't sleep, but orders breakfast then meets with Woltz at 10.
It's a pretty tight schedule, but that's show business.
OK, thanks to johnny ola's information about the plane (he knows his planes as well as he does his cars) and to olivant's scenario we're able to pretty much figure that the timing was impossible to happen as it appears in the novel.
We're told that "it was late Sunday night before Tom Hagen could kiss his wife good-bye and drive out to the airport". Lets be generous and give him a little extra time and assume he arived at the airport and the plane took off at 10:00 p.m.
Now, that plane he would have taken had a cruising speed of 220 m.p.h. and a range of about 2,300 miles. The air distance between NY and LA is about 2,450 miles so the plane would have needed to stop at least once to refuel. Allowing for one hour for that to happen it would have taken, at minimum, some 12½ hours to complete the trip. Subtract the 3 hours for the time difference and Hagen would have arrived in LA at 7:30 a.m. (local time).
The novel says, "it was still dark when the plane landed in Los Angeles. Hagen checked into his hotel, showered and shaved and watched dawn come over the city". Even assuming that Hagen got to his hotel in a VERY short time and showered quickly it would be about 8:00 a.m. at that point.
The sunrise for LA at the end of August is about 6:20 a.m.
OK... I've learned two things from this:
1. I have totally too much time on my hands.
2. Puzo wasn't completely accurate.
