Flight Distance & Duration Calculator

Great-circle distance is the floor, never the flight

The shortest path between two points on a sphere is an arc of the great circle through them, and that is what the haversine formula on this page computes. It is the distance airlines quote, the distance frequent-flyer programmes credit, and the distance used to band compensation under EU261. It is also a distance no aircraft actually flies.

Real tracks are longer, for reasons that are all boring and all unavoidable: airways are fixed corridors rather than free-form arcs, some airspace is closed for political or military reasons, oceanic crossings use assigned tracks that shift daily with the jet stream, and departure and arrival procedures add miles at both ends. Two to five per cent over the great circle is typical. Closed airspace can make it far worse — routings that would once have crossed Russia or Ukraine now go around, and on some Europe-to-Asia pairs that is hours rather than minutes.

How the time estimate is built

A flight is not a cruise. It is a taxi, a climb, a cruise, a descent, an approach and another taxi, and the parts that are not cruise consume time out of proportion to the distance they cover. So the estimate here is cruise time at a speed appropriate to the sector, plus a fixed overhead that grows a little with distance: about 40 minutes on a short hop, about an hour on an ultra-long sector. That is why a 300 km flight is scheduled at an hour and ten rather than at twenty-five minutes.

What it cannot know is the wind. The jet stream runs west to east across the North Atlantic and the North Pacific at speeds that regularly exceed 200 km/h, which is why London to New York is reliably an hour longer than New York to London. This page gives one figure for both directions. Expect the eastbound leg to beat it and the westbound leg to miss it, by up to an hour on a transatlantic sector.

Block time, flight time and the schedule

• Block time is chocks-off to chocks-on: the number in the timetable, and what this page estimates. It includes taxiing at both ends.
• Flight time is wheels-up to wheels-down, and is shorter — at a big hub, twenty to thirty minutes shorter.
• Scheduled time is block time plus padding the airline adds so its punctuality statistics survive a normal day. Schedules on congested routes have grown by ten to fifteen minutes over the decades without the aircraft getting any slower.

About the airport list

389 airports, with coordinates compiled from the public OpenFlights dataset in September 2026 and rounded to four decimal places — a little over ten metres, which is far finer than anything this calculation needs. It covers the major international airports and the ones that matter around the Caucasus and Central Asia; it is deliberately not every airfield in the world. If an airport is missing, the reason is that the list is curated rather than exhaustive, not that the airport is unimportant. Nothing here is fetched at runtime: the whole dataset ships inside the page.