Distance Between Two Airports
Find the direct aerial distance between any two airports in kilometres, miles and nautical miles. Search by airport name, city, country, or IATA/ICAO code.
DEL to DXB
Indira Gandhi International Airport
New Delhi, India
28.5556, 77.0952
Dubai International Airport
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
25.2498, 55.3710
2,182 km
- 2,182 kilometres
- 1,356 miles
- 1,178 nautical miles
- 265.4° initial bearing (west)
This is the direct aerial distance — the great-circle distance between the two airports' coordinates. It is not a driving distance, and an aircraft will normally cover a little more than this because it follows published airways, avoids restricted airspace and adjusts for weather and traffic.
Aerial distance is the term this tool calculates — it is the straight-line distance over the Earth's surface, sometimes written as "arial distance". It is not the same as road distance or the exact track an aircraft flies.
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Quick answer
This tool calculates the direct aerial distance — the great-circle distance — between any two airports. Search for a departure and destination airport by name, city, country, IATA code or ICAO code, and the result is shown in kilometres, miles and nautical miles, along with the initial compass bearing. This is the shortest distance over the Earth's surface, not a driving distance and not the exact route an aircraft flies.
Key facts
- Distance is calculated with the Haversine formula on a sphere of mean radius 6,371.0088 km.
- Results are given in kilometres, miles and nautical miles, plus the initial compass bearing.
- Airports can be found by name, city, country, IATA code (DEL) or ICAO code (VIDP).
- Coordinates come from the OurAirports public-domain dataset covering 5,332 airports.
- The figure is the direct aerial distance, not a road distance and not the exact track flown.
- A real flight is normally a little longer because it follows published airways and avoids restricted airspace.
- A route can be shared or bookmarked as a link, for example /distance-between-two-airports?from=DEL&to=DXB.
- The tool is free, needs no account, and calculates without contacting any external service.
What is this tool?
The distance between two airports is the length of the shortest line joining them across the Earth's surface. Because the Earth is very nearly a sphere rather than a flat sheet, that shortest line is not a straight line on a printed map — it is an arc known as a great-circle path.
This is why a flight from London to Tokyo passes close to the Arctic rather than heading due east as a flat map suggests it should. The great-circle route genuinely is shorter; it only looks longer because flattening a globe onto a rectangle stretches the areas near the poles.
The term is sometimes written as "arial distance". The intended word is aerial — through the air — and it means the same thing as the great-circle or direct distance reported here.
How to use it
Start typing in the From airport field. You can enter almost anything you know about the airport: its IATA code (DEL), its ICAO code (VIDP), its name (Indira Gandhi), its city (Delhi) or its country. Matching airports appear as you type, with the IATA code shown first so you can confirm you have the right one.
Choose an airport with the mouse, or with the arrow keys followed by Enter. Repeat for the To airport field, then press Calculate distance.
The Swap button reverses the two airports, which is useful for checking a return leg — the distance is identical, but the initial bearing is not. Copy link produces a URL containing both airport codes, so a specific route can be bookmarked or sent to someone else and will open with the result already showing.
- Type the departure airport in the From field — an airport name, city, country, IATA code or ICAO code all work.
- Choose the airport you meant from the suggestion list, using the mouse or the arrow keys and Enter.
- Do the same for the destination airport in the To field.
- Press Calculate distance.
- Read the result in kilometres, miles and nautical miles, together with the initial bearing and both sets of coordinates.
- Use Swap to reverse the direction, or Copy link to share the exact route.
Example
A few routes, calculated with this tool:
- Delhi (DEL) to Mumbai (BOM) — about 1,148 km, 713 miles, or 620 nautical miles, on an initial bearing of roughly 202° (south-south-west).
- New York JFK to London Heathrow (LHR) — about 5,555 km, 3,452 miles, or 3,000 nautical miles, setting off north-east rather than due east.
- Dubai (DXB) to Singapore (SIN) — about 5,842 km, 3,630 miles, or 3,155 nautical miles.
The JFK–LHR example shows the great-circle effect clearly: London is almost due east of New York on a flat map, but the shortest path leaves on a north-easterly heading and curves over the North Atlantic.
How it works
Each airport in the dataset carries a latitude and a longitude. The distance between two of them is calculated with the Haversine formula, the standard method for great-circle distance on a sphere:
a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ · cos φ₂ · sin²(Δλ/2)d = 2R · asin(√a)
Here φ is latitude, λ is longitude, and R is the Earth's mean radius, taken as 6,371.0088 km. Haversine is preferred over the spherical law of cosines because it stays numerically accurate for short distances as well as long ones — which matters when two airports serve the same city.
The result is converted using 1 km = 0.6213711922 miles and 1 km = 0.5399568035 nautical miles. The initial bearing is calculated separately and reported in degrees clockwise from true north.
Modelling the Earth as a sphere rather than as the slightly flattened ellipsoid it really is introduces an error of roughly 0.3% — a few kilometres on an intercontinental route. That is far smaller than the difference between the aerial distance and the distance an aircraft actually covers, so it is not the limiting factor in any practical use of this number.
Common use cases
Aerial distance between airports is used for:
- Comparing routes — deciding whether a connection is a genuine detour or barely longer than the direct option.
- Checking frequent-flyer mileage — many programmes award miles based on great-circle distance, so this is the figure to compare an award statement against.
- Rough fuel and time estimates — as the starting input for a calculation, before route, winds and payload are taken into account.
- Aviation study and training — nautical miles and true bearings are the working units of navigation.
- Logistics and freight planning — a first approximation of how far cargo travels by air.
- Curiosity — simply knowing how far apart two places really are.
Benefits
- Search by IATA code, ICAO code, airport name, city or country — whichever you happen to know.
- Three units at once: kilometres, miles and nautical miles, with no second conversion step.
- The initial compass bearing, which most distance calculators omit.
- Both airports' coordinates shown, so the result can be checked independently.
- Shareable links: a route travels as a URL and opens with the answer already on screen.
- Full keyboard operation and screen-reader support.
- Free, with no account and no usage limit.
Limitations
This figure is the direct aerial distance, and there are several things it deliberately is not:
- It is not a driving distance. Roads follow terrain and existing infrastructure; the aerial distance ignores both.
- It is not the exact distance an aircraft flies. Real flights follow published airways and waypoints, route around restricted airspace, weather and terrain, and are assigned tracks by air traffic control. The actual track is normally a few per cent longer, and can be considerably longer where airspace is closed.
- It does not include taxiing, holding or diversions, all of which add distance on the day.
- The Earth is modelled as a sphere, which costs roughly 0.3% against an ellipsoidal calculation.
- Airport coordinates are a single reference point — usually near the terminal — not the position of a particular runway threshold.
- The dataset covers airports with an IATA code, which means a small airfield with no commercial service may not appear.
Privacy & your data
The airport list is downloaded to your browser once and then searched on your device, so what you type into the search boxes is not sent anywhere as you type it.
If you press Calculate without JavaScript, or open a shared link containing two airport codes, those two codes are sent to this site's server as ordinary URL parameters so the page can be rendered — that is a normal page request, and the codes appear in standard web-server logs as any URL does. No airport search or calculation is ever sent to a third-party service.
This page is served with the same cookie, consent and advertising configuration as the rest of A2Z.Tools; see the site privacy policy for those details. No account is required and no calculation history is kept against you.
Frequently asked questions
How is the distance between two airports calculated?
Each airport has a published latitude and longitude. The tool applies the Haversine formula to those two coordinate pairs, which gives the great-circle distance — the shortest path over the surface of the Earth — using a mean Earth radius of 6,371.0088 km. The result is then converted into miles and nautical miles.
Is airport distance the same as flight distance?
No. This is the direct aerial distance, which is the shortest possible path. A real flight follows published airways and waypoints, avoids restricted airspace, and is routed by air traffic control around weather and traffic, so the distance actually flown is normally a few per cent longer — occasionally much longer when airspace is closed.
Can I search using an IATA airport code?
Yes. Type the three-letter IATA code — DEL, JFK, LHR, DXB — and the matching airport appears first. Four-letter ICAO codes such as VIDP or EGLL work too, as do airport names, city names and country names.
What is the difference between miles and nautical miles?
A statute mile is 1.609 km and is the everyday mile used on roads. A nautical mile is 1.852 km — historically one minute of latitude — and is the standard unit in aviation and at sea. A nautical mile is about 15% longer than a statute mile, so the same route always shows a smaller number in nautical miles.
How accurate is this airport distance calculator?
The great-circle calculation itself is accurate to within about 0.3%, which is the error introduced by treating the Earth as a sphere rather than as a slightly flattened ellipsoid. On a 5,000 km route that is a difference of a few kilometres. The larger uncertainty is not in the arithmetic but in the question: the distance an aircraft actually covers differs from the aerial distance by considerably more than 0.3%.
Why is the actual flight route longer than the aerial distance?
Aircraft do not fly point to point in a vacuum. They join published airways between navigation waypoints, keep clear of restricted and congested airspace, take routings that use favourable winds or avoid storms, and follow departure and arrival procedures at each end. Every one of those adds distance to the theoretical shortest path.
Does the tool calculate flight time?
No, and deliberately so. Flight time depends on the aircraft type, cruise speed, routing, headwinds and tailwinds, altitude, air traffic delays and time spent taxiing. A time derived from distance alone would be a guess presented as a figure, so the tool reports distance and bearing and leaves it at that.
Is the airport distance calculator free?
Yes. It is free to use, needs no account or sign-up, and has no usage limit. The airport data is a public-domain dataset and the calculation runs without contacting any paid or external service.
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