Some notes about plane trips length and shape of

the Earth
by TK

1 Presentation
The idea is to collect timetables of direct flights between different cities (better using mean
value between two directions to avoid dominant winds eects). Then postulating that the time
of fglight is likled to the actual disance between two cities by a simple relation. We'll pose T =
a + bD, where T is the time of ight, a a constant (that take into account boarding time, takeo and landing, etc.), b a speed, and D the actual distance.
With a few cities of known distances we t the data to get the best a and b vales. Then we
can use the equation to infer distances between other cities.
By wisely choosing the cities, we expect to conclude that the city space cant be Euclidean.

2 Calibration
Using know distances to calibrate our function:
The following table was used, data from http://maps.google.fr:
From
To
Time
(to
from) Distance (km)
Paris London
1:10:00 1:10:00 1:10:00
200
Paris Buccuresti 2:57:30 2:50:00 3:05:00
1868
Paris Warsaw
2:15:00 2:10:00 2:20:00
1368
Paris Berlin
1:40:00 1:35:00 1:45:00
800
Paris Moscow
3:37:30 3:25:00 3:50:00
2485
Table 1.

This allow to nd the best t:

Figure 1.

The t is pretty good, and gives the following values:

1

Section 4

Distance (km) = 0.25 x Time (secondes) -763

3 Deducing distances
We can now deduce unknown distances from
Here is an example of application:
From
To
Time
Paris
London
1:10:00
Paris
Buccuresti
2:57:30
Paris
Warsaw
2:15:00
Paris
Berlin
1:40:00
Paris
Moscow
3:37:30
Paris
HongKong
12:12:30
Paris
LosAngeles
11:02:30
Paris
Johanesbourg 10:40:00
HongKong Sydney
9:05:00
HongKong Johanesbourg 12:45:00
HongKong LosAngeles
13:57:30
Sydney
LosAngeles
14:12:30
Sydney
Johanesbourg 13:05:00

the relation found above.

(to
1:10:00
2:50:00
2:10:00
1:35:00
3:25:00
11:35:00
11:30:00
10:30:00
9:15:00
12:40:00
13:05:00
13:40:00
14:20:00

from) D1 (km) D2 (km)

1:10:00
290
200
3:05:00
1908
1868
2:20:00
1268
1368
1:45:00
742
800
3:50:00
2510
2485
12:50:00
10262
9615
10:35:00
9209
9085
10:50:00
8870
8228
8:55:00
7440
7385
12:50:00
10752
10718
14:50:00
11843
11647
14:45:00
12069
12073
11:50:00
11053
11040

Table 2.

D1 is the computed distance according to the t above. D2 is the actual distance given by
Google Map.

4 Conclusion
Just try to put all those cities on a plane, respecting the distances above.