Data & method
Every number here is computed, not copied. Here is the arithmetic.
The dataset
Airport names, IATA and ICAO codes, coordinates and elevations come from OurAirports, a community-maintained database explicitly released into the public domain. It is rebuilt nightly at source, and this site is regenerated against it.
Citation: OurAirports airport database — released to the public domain by David Megginson and contributors. Retrieved 2026-07-28 from ourairports.com/data.
Of the 85,815 entries in the source, this site publishes the 3,269 that have scheduled passenger service, a valid three-letter IATA code, and large or medium airport status. Heliports, airstrips, military fields and closed airports are excluded.
Distance
All distances are great-circle distances — the shortest path between two points across the surface of a sphere — calculated with the haversine formula on a mean earth radius of 6,371.0088 km. This is why the route line looks curved on a flat map: the map is the distortion, not the line.
Real flown distance is typically 2–5% longer, because aircraft follow published airways, route around weather, terrain and restricted airspace, and fly arrival and departure procedures that are not straight lines.
Flight time
The estimate is deliberately simple, and stated in full so you can check it:
Gate-to-gate hours = 0.42 + distance km ÷ 805
The 25-minute constant covers pushback, taxi, climb, descent, approach and taxi-in — the reason a 400 km hop is scheduled at well over an hour. The 805 km/h figure is a representative cruise speed for a commercial jet.
What this model ignores: winds (a jet stream can swing a transatlantic crossing by an hour in either direction), aircraft type, altitude, air traffic delays, and the schedule padding airlines add for on-time statistics. Every route page also shows the same distance at four different cruise speeds so you can see how much that assumption is worth.
Bearing and midpoint
The bearing shown is the initial great-circle bearing at the departure airport. On a long route the bearing changes continuously — this is why polar routes appear to head far north of the destination. The midpoint is the halfway point along the great circle, computed by spherical interpolation.
What this site does not do
- It does not know airline schedules. No feed of who flies what. A route page tells you the geometry, not whether anyone sells that ticket.
- It does not show local arrival times. That needs reliable time-zone data per airport, which the source does not carry — so rather than guess from longitude and be wrong for half the world, it is left out.
- It does not sell flights. There is no booking affiliate feed dressed up as a search result.
Flight times are great-circle estimates for planning only — always check the airline's published schedule.
Corrections
Wrong coordinates or a stale airport code are worth reporting — send the page URL, and upstream fixes go to OurAirports.