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 ight is linked to the actual distance 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, take-
o 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 values. 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
2 Section 4

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

3 Deducing distances
We can now deduce unknown distances from the relation found above.
Here is an example of application:
From To Time (to from) D1 (km) D2 (km)
Paris London 1:10:00 1:10:00 1:10:00 290 200
Paris Buccuresti 2:57:30 2:50:00 3:05:00 1908 1868
Paris Warsaw 2:15:00 2:10:00 2:20:00 1268 1368
Paris Berlin 1:40:00 1:35:00 1:45:00 742 800
Paris Moscow 3:37:30 3:25:00 3:50:00 2510 2485
Paris HongKong 12:12:30 11:35:00 12:50:00 10262 9615
Paris LosAngeles 11:02:30 11:30:00 10:35:00 9209 9085
Paris Johanesbourg 10:40:00 10:30:00 10:50:00 8870 8228
HongKong Sydney 9:05:00 9:15:00 8:55:00 7440 7385
HongKong Johanesbourg 12:45:00 12:40:00 12:50:00 10752 10718
HongKong LosAngeles 13:57:30 13:05:00 14:50:00 11843 11647
Sydney LosAngeles 14:12:30 13:40:00 14:45:00 12069 12073
Sydney Johanesbourg 13:05:00 14:20:00 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.