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Route Ranking: Tips for Sorting Flights by Distance
Route Ranking gives you a jumbled departure board and asks you to put the flights in order of distance. Because you can see all the routes at once, the skill is comparison, not measurement.
Sort in two passes
First, split the board into short, medium and long routes. Anything within one region (for example Chicago to Winnipeg) is short. Crossing one ocean is medium. Crossing the Pacific, or going from one end of the world to the other, is long. Only then sort within each group.
Use anchors to place each route
- Under 2,000 km: a single country or neighbouring countries.
- 3,000 to 6,000 km: across the Atlantic, or most of a large continent.
- 8,000 to 11,000 km: Europe to East Asia, or East Coast US to Asia.
- Above 12,000 km: routes that span most of the globe, such as Europe to Australia or South America to East Asia.
Watch for the surprises
Routes in the Southern Hemisphere are easy to underrate. Cape Town to Perth, for example, is far longer than it feels because there is no land to give you reference points. Routes over the poles also look longer on a flat map than they are.
The difficulty levels
Easy has four routes with big gaps. Medium has five, with gaps of about 8 percent. Hard has six routes that can be only 3 percent apart, so you will usually need to compare latitude and longitude differences carefully.
Scoring
You score one point for each route placed in its correct position, out of the number of routes. The answer board shows the real distances and the correct order so you can learn from every miss.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change an answer?
Yes. Use Undo to remove the last route you placed.
Why are some routes impossible to fly?
The board compares pairs of major airports, not scheduled flights.
Keep learning
Related guides: Longer Flight, Shortcut, Pinpoint. Or browse all game guides, the geography games and the country pages.