Distance Calculator

What this measures

Enter two sets of coordinates and the tool returns the great-circle distance: the shortest path between two points across the surface of a sphere. It is the distance an aircraft would fly with no detours, and it is what people mean by “as the crow flies”. Paris to New York comes out at roughly 5,837 km (3,627 miles).

It is not a driving distance, a walking distance, or a route. Any road between two places is longer than the great-circle line, usually by a margin that grows with terrain: a coastal or mountain route can easily be half as long again. Treat the result as a floor, never an estimate of travel time.

Why flight paths look curved on a map

On the flat maps most of us picture, a long-haul route between two northern cities appears to arc far north of the straight line joining them. The route is not a detour. The map is. Flattening a sphere onto a rectangle stretches the high latitudes enormously, so the genuinely shortest path looks bent. This is why flights between Europe and North America track close to Greenland, and why the distance this tool gives is often shorter than the one you would guess from an atlas.

Finding coordinates

The tool takes latitude and longitude in decimal degrees. Latitude runs from −90 to 90, positive north of the equator; longitude runs from −180 to 180, positive east of Greenwich. The most common input error is dropping a minus sign, which puts the point in the wrong hemisphere and produces a distance that is wildly wrong rather than slightly wrong: if your answer looks implausible, check the signs first.

Every country, city and destination guide on FANOUSS shows a location map for that place, which is a quick way to get coordinates you can trust for a specific site rather than for a city centre several kilometres away.

Where the number is genuinely useful

Sanity-checking a flight. Divide the distance by a typical cruising speed and you get a rough lower bound on flying time. If a schedule claims something far faster, one of your inputs is wrong. The Flight Duration Calculator works out the real elapsed time from the printed departure and arrival times.

Judging whether a day trip is realistic. A destination 80 km away in a straight line might be an hour by motorway or four hours on a mountain road. The great-circle figure tells you the best case; the road network decides the rest. Our destination guides note where the two diverge sharply.

Comparing itinerary options. When you are deciding the order in which to visit several places, comparing straight-line distances between them is a fast way to spot a route that doubles back on itself, before you start pricing actual transport.

Understanding a country’s scale. Measuring corner to corner is the quickest cure for underestimating a large country. It is what stops a two-week itinerary from trying to cover a continent.

What it cannot tell you

It does not know about terrain, borders, water, or whether any transport connection exists at all. Two towns 30 km apart across a mountain range or an international border can be a full day’s travel apart. It also ignores altitude: the figure is a surface distance, which is the right measure for travel planning but not for anything requiring elevation.

Related tools

For local times at either end of a journey, see the Time Zone Converter. To estimate what a trip costs once you arrive, use the Trip Budget Calculator. Browse places by region in our country guides and destination guides.