Thirty-four countries are within three hours of London

People who want to add countries to their map tend to think in terms of the big trip: two weeks, somewhere far, a proper undertaking.

The arithmetic says otherwise. Measured properly — great circle distance from Heathrow to each country's primary international airport — thirty-four countries sit within an estimated three hours of flying time of London. Ten of them are within two.

That is a third of the way to a hundred countries, entirely within the range of a long weekend, and most of the list is not where people expect.

What "three hours" means here

Every figure below is a great circle distance computed from the airports' real coordinates — the shortest path over a sphere, which is the only distance measure worth using.

The times are estimates derived from that distance, using the same formula Orbit uses when you log a flight without timestamps: a typical airliner block speed of 500 mph, plus thirty minutes for taxi, climb and descent. Real schedules vary by twenty minutes or so in either direction depending on winds, routing and how far the gate is from the runway. They are close enough to sort a list by, and not close enough to plan a connection with.

Under two hours

Ten countries, and the first three are under an hour of flying. Paris is 348 km from Heathrow — nearer than Newcastle at 405 km, and considerably nearer than Edinburgh at 534 km. Three of England's neighbours abroad are a shorter flight than most of its own country.

Two to three hours

The ones that surprise people

Iceland is closer than Greece. Keflavík is 1,895 km from Heathrow; Athens is 2,427 km. Reykjavík reads as remote because it is north and in the middle of an ocean, and neither of those makes it far.

Africa is inside the three hours. Algiers is 1,669 km — nearer than Riga, nearer than Belgrade, nearer than Helsinki. Tunis is 1,831 km, which puts Tunisia closer to London than Istanbul, Bucharest or Marrakesh. For anyone counting continents rather than countries, the cheapest continent to add from London is Africa, and it is a shorter flight than Stockholm.

The Baltics are not far away. Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn all sit between 1,690 and 1,808 km — the same band as Rome and Lisbon. Three countries, one region, and each of them a shorter flight than Sofia.

The Balkans are dense. Sarajevo, Belgrade, Podgorica, Prishtina, Tirana and Skopje are all inside three hours, and all within about 350 km of each other. If the goal is genuinely to add countries to a map, no other part of Europe returns as many per kilometre flown.

The near misses

Four countries fall just outside, close enough to be annoying:

Then Ukraine at 3h 13m, Greece at 3h 31m and Türkiye at 3h 35m. Push the threshold to four hours and you add all of them plus the Canaries and Cyprus, and the total goes past forty.

What this is actually an argument for

Not for flying more. Short-haul is the least defensible flying there is, and for a lot of these — Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and increasingly Frankfurt and Zurich — the train wins on door-to-door time anyway, never mind on everything else.

It is an argument against a specific bad instinct: that the map only fills up through big expensive trips, and that anything within a few hundred kilometres is not really travelling. Thirty-four countries say otherwise. Most people who have been flying out of London for ten years have taken more of these flights than they remember, and have never counted them, because a weekend in Ljubljana did not feel like it should go in the same category as a fortnight in Peru.

It goes in the same category. It is the same map.

If you want to find out how many of the thirty-four you have actually landed in, the flights are in your inbox — there is a method for getting them out, and it takes about an evening. Orbit will work out the distances and the country list from the airport codes; all it needs from you is where and roughly when.

Related reading: counting countries: what actually counts and layovers worth leaving the airport for.