How Long Does It Take A Plane To Fly Around The Globe?

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A couple of years ago, FlightRadar24 released a nice pair of videos on YouTube about how Finnair have had to change their flight paths to avoid the airspaces of certain countries:

  1. Flying the long way to Tokyo on the Finnair A350
  2. How to fly an A350 over the North Pole

The second video in particular is great - I love seeing the flight crew have to use “old” radios to talk to ATC as they go out of coverage of the more modern systems. I realised the other day that the algorithm to calculate the flight paths emanating from an airport, whilst avoiding the airspaces of certain countries, was identical to the algorithm which I wrote in GST to sail a ship around the globe. Therefore, I quickly knocked up a sibling Python module, GFT, to study this problem.

The order of the calculation is the same, the only difference compared to GST is creating the Polygons to fly/sail around: in GST it is all of the land on the planet (with the ship starting on water) but in GFT it is only the land of the countries to be avoided (with the plane starting outside of those countries).

After all of the processing to obtain a useable dataset of the country borders, an important consideration is how many points are used to describe the country borders. Some places in the world will have more points to describe the country borders than others. This can significantly affect run time later on. For different levels of processing quality, here are maps of the number of points in the country border dataset around the world.

Download:
  1. 512 px × 256 px (0.1 Mpx; 12.1 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 512 px (0.5 Mpx; 27.9 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 1,024 px (2.1 Mpx; 63.2 KiB)
  4. 3,600 px × 1,800 px (6.5 Mpx; 14.2 KiB)
Download:
  1. 512 px × 256 px (0.1 Mpx; 12.7 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 512 px (0.5 Mpx; 29.9 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 1,024 px (2.1 Mpx; 69.9 KiB)
  4. 3,600 px × 1,800 px (6.5 Mpx; 18.7 KiB)
Download:
  1. 512 px × 256 px (0.1 Mpx; 13.3 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 512 px (0.5 Mpx; 31.3 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 1,024 px (2.1 Mpx; 73.4 KiB)
  4. 3,600 px × 1,800 px (6.5 Mpx; 20.6 KiB)

The animation of flying out of Tokyo Haneda across the entire globe is below:

Download:
  1. 512 px × 288 px (0.1 Mpx; 268.2 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 576 px (0.6 Mpx; 688.3 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 1,152 px (2.4 Mpx; 1.1 MiB)
  4. 3,840 px × 2,160 px (8.3 Mpx; 2.4 MiB)

There are two interesting narrow features in this expansion. Firstly, there is a tiny gap between Iran and Russia where you can fly through Azerbaijan if you want to:

Download:
  1. 512 px × 512 px (0.3 Mpx; 117.9 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 1,024 px (1.0 Mpx; 231.7 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 2,048 px (4.2 Mpx; 458.0 KiB)
  4. 2,160 px × 2,160 px (4.7 Mpx; 471.5 KiB)

The second interesting narrow feature is the tiny gap between Belarus and the Russian territory of Kaliningrad where you can fly through Poland and Lithuania if you want to:

Download:
  1. 512 px × 512 px (0.3 Mpx; 80.2 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 1,024 px (1.0 Mpx; 186.3 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 2,048 px (4.2 Mpx; 387.8 KiB)
  4. 2,160 px × 2,160 px (4.7 Mpx; 390.1 KiB)

The flight paths (which go north over the North Pole) meet the flight paths (which go west over the Middle East) over Estonia and Latvia:

Download:
  1. 512 px × 512 px (0.3 Mpx; 127.7 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 1,024 px (1.0 Mpx; 315.4 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 2,048 px (4.2 Mpx; 729.6 KiB)
  4. 2,160 px × 2,160 px (4.7 Mpx; 760.5 KiB)

Ignoring air currents, and assuming that you can fly the exact flight path that you want to, then flying over the North Pole is quicker for the route between Tokyo Haneda and Helsinki Vantaa:

Download:
  1. 512 px × 512 px (0.3 Mpx; 401.4 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 1,024 px (1.0 Mpx; 746.1 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 2,048 px (4.2 Mpx; 1.5 MiB)
  4. 2,160 px × 2,160 px (4.7 Mpx; 1.8 MiB)

Enjoy!