i love a good mystery...

One of my favorite childhood memories is watching Mystery on rainy nights with my dad in "the TV room", my father smoking his pipe and me wishing I were British. The only cartoon I ever liked was Scooby Doo. My back-up career is Detective.
I'm so into this shit, I'm pretty sure I know the identity of Jack the Ripper.
So you can imagine my delight as I groggily rolled out of bed this morning (Thank you, Brian D. for a lovely Saturday evening, by the way) and found THIS!
I have no idea who this Kevin at the Chronicle is, but I am in love with this article, which is basically about a mysterious plane crash that happened 50 years ago THIS Thursday. I cannot express to you the joy I found sipping my coffee and reading about this fascinating, San Francisco-based tale.
Think about it. A super glam 1950's luxury plane with a BAR in the middle "disappeared" leaving behind 72 pieces of debris and 19 bodies, one of whom was a stewardess still strapped to her seat.
In a life vest.
Hmmm. This would be a hot topic for rainy, smokey nights in the TV room.
My initial question is this: The plane left SFO for Hawaii at 11:51am. According to the watches of the 19 bodies, the plane crashed at 5:25pm, I'm guessing PST.
JUST, according to Kevin, as the passengers were about to be served a 7 course meal. This would imply that hours were left on this, again, super glam flight.
Why's it take so long to fly to Hawaii? According to Orbitz and personal experience, it's 5 hours from SFO to basically anywhere cool, including Honolulu.
Why were they in the air for so long? They weren't even close when they crashed, not that anyone has ever found the wreckage. Did it take dramatically longer to fly somewhere in 1957 than it does now?
Anyway, I'm all over this. Everyone should read this magnificent article and then meet me somewhere so we can smoke pipes and drink Sherry and solve this shit...