A friend of mine from Indonesia told me a few weeks ago that flying from one end of his country to the other was longer than flying from London to Uzbekistan, or flying transatlantic from London to Boston. I thought this couldn't possibly be true, but when I looked it up, it was.
The Mercator projection really messes with one's sense of relative distances, and so inspired by other visualization sites like thetruesize.com which account for this, I thought I'd build this small web app to help myself and others build better intuitions about flight distances.
A friend of mine from Indonesia told me a few weeks ago that flying from one end of his country to the other was longer than flying from London to Uzbekistan, or flying transatlantic from London to Boston. I thought this couldn't possibly be true, but when I looked it up, it was.
The Mercator projection really messes with one's sense of relative distances, and so inspired by other visualization sites like thetruesize.com which account for this, I thought I'd build this small web app to help myself and others build better intuitions about flight distances.