I like to travel, and over the last years I have been travelling a lot in Europe since I have worked for the international student association EGEA. When I made a speech for the end of my board year I wanted to find out how far I had travelled in total by plane to events and meetings for EGEA. In order to do that I first looked up the tickets, and wrote down the airports I had travelled through for each travel, like Trondheim-Amsterdam, Amsterdam Munich, Vienna-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Trondheim. I then used the tool Great Circle Mapper to find the distances. On this website I entered the airport codes, which for the previous example is trd-ams,ams-muc,vie-ams,ams-trd, and then I got the distances for each part and the total for that travel. This website can also do some other interesting calculations. Click the image above to see how this looks like.
The distances are called great circle paths, which, according to their FAQ is the shortest path on the surface of a sphere between two points on that sphere, but since the Earth is not a true sphere the term geodesic path is a more technically correct term. There are also other tools to calculate a flight distance, such as Travelmath. They are both based on Vincenty’s formulae and uses the WGS84 ellipsoid model which is also used for GPS.
Maps generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.