Lange flyruter

The world's longest non-stop flights, mapped

Kvetching about your five-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles? Some passengers have it a lot worse, as the map below by Vizual Statistixs Seth Kadish shows. You could be flying from Sydney to Dallas, a 8,578 mile journey, or Johannesburg to Atlanta, 8,439 miles. Both of these flights take upwards of 15 hours, non-stop.

Kadish has mapped the world's 20 longest non-stop flights, and some of them are brutal. The color key at the bottom of the map indicates how long the flights are, ranging from 7,500 miles in blue to 8,500 miles in yellow. Many of the longest flights involve traveling from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere or vice versa, as in the Sydney to Dallas or Johannesburg to Atlanta flights.

Flights between North America and Dubai, Doha, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong or Mumbai also measure as some of the longest, as well as Dubai to São Paulo. (Pro-tip: The Earth is round, so the straightest path between many of these destinations is over the North Atlantic. On a flat map these flight paths look like big arcs, but on a globe they would be straight lines.)

Kadish used a Robinson projection for the map; as a consequence, some flights that go over the Arctic Circle appear longer than they are. Kadish also did this visualization last March, so some of the commercial flight paths may have changed slightly since then.