In the news- extreme day trips

I'm intrigued. I've done it before locally to go to a football game, and I had a friend who did it for the gold medal hockey game in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, but now I'm intrigued for next November. My wife and I will be in London where we'll meet my in-laws who are flying in a few days later. Now I'm curious if I can pack in a couple of "day trips" before they arrive... just because.

This has been commonplace for business travelers as long as air travel has existed. Back in the ‘90s I day tripped virtually weekly from DC to Texas, Florida, Minneapolis etc. And if price and logistics work for leisure travel (putting aside environmental issues), why not fly 2 hours each way to a place 1000 miles away rather than 2 hours each way in a bus or train to a place 100 miles away? The furthest such day trip I’ve done for fun is Istanbul to Ephesus (flying to Izmir).

From the UK at Christmas time a lot of people do day trips to Santa Claus village in Finland by air, which are often close to 18 hour days.
It is quite normal in the UK for people to do 600 to 800 mile day trips by train on the main lines, especially for business.
Sometime in May or June I'm about to do 14 straight days of that. It is easy and a shed load cheaper than staying in hotels and keeping on moving hotels every day or two, using the domestic equivalent of a Brit rail pass.

I don’t think I have the stamina for the extreme Ryanair style day trip. It usually involves getting up at 3am for a mega early flight. I’m too tired after that to have a productive day.

Interesting. I would do an overnight maybe. But I live in a city with Wizz or Ryan connections to most every significant city in Europe and city to airport is 35 minutes. Most of the flights are $25 to $60 with a day bag.

EDIT: But on further consideration.
1) For this to work the destination needs to be popular enough to merit multiple discount flights each day (one early, one late at least). Most destinations are not served every day of the week, much less multiple times of the day. Maybe you can get lucky, in on Wizz and out on Ryan.
2) Then the destination must be one that has an airport that isn’t pure torture an hour and a 75-euro taxi ride each way in and out of town.
The problem is that often to get No.1 above you also end up with No. 2 above.

I've done plenty of business day trips as well but that was always with other people's money. We've thought about a cheap flight before but with an overnight, however that can require paying for two hotels if we kept our home base one as well, plus possibly a luggage fee. If the flights work out and we can turn it into a 15-18 hour day, that opens possibilities.

Not in Europe, but I did an “extreme almost day trip” one year to bump up my airline status. I needed one flight about the distance of a RT Seattle-to-Boston by the end of December. I made a rotation with my hand over the map & realized Hawaii would achieve it! My first trip to Hawaii was an overnight on a weekend in early December. Delta had specials, and the Hilton on Oahu had a special rate. It ended up hardly costing me anything with the free bump up at the time into Premium Economy for the flights that next year. And, I had a lot of fun spending 24 hours in Hawaii!

I'm doing it in June to attend a wedding in another province. It's a week before my New Zealand/Australia trip, and I don't want to be away for an overnight at that time, because it would mean getting pet care, etc.

A friend of mine did a day trip from Calgary to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears.