A small tool for seeing the true distance between places on Earth — measured along a great circle on a 3D globe, not distorted by the Mercator projection that dominates flat world maps.
Most world maps you see use the Mercator projection. It's brilliant for marine navigation because it preserves direction (a constant compass bearing is a straight line), but it badly distorts distance and area. Greenland looks larger than Africa even though Africa is 14 times bigger. A flight from Oslo to Tokyo looks like it should sweep through Europe and Central Asia, but actually arcs over the Arctic — because the shortest path on a sphere is rarely the straight line you'd draw on a flat map.
This site lets you see what the real distance is, on a real globe, between any two cities or countries on Earth. You can:
Distances are calculated using the haversine formula, which gives the great-circle distance between two latitude/longitude points on a sphere. The 3D globe is rendered with WebGL via Three.js. Country outlines come from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset. City search uses the free Open-Meteo Geocoding API for global coverage.
This site builds on free, open resources:
As-the-crow-flies is a small independent project. It's free to use, contains no tracking beyond standard server logs and ad-related cookies, and has no account or paywall. The site is supported by display advertising — see our Privacy Policy for details on how ads work here.
Questions, suggestions, or corrections (especially border-data inaccuracies)? See the Contact page.
Try the globe →