📏 Nairobi to Tunis

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5,049 km · 3,137 mi
Great-circle (haversine, R = 6371.0088 km)5,049.1 km
Miles (international)3,137.4 mi
Nautical miles2,726.3 nmi
Initial true bearing329.7° NNW
Flight at 900 km/h (no climb, taxi or wind)337 min
Drive at 80 km/h, non-stop63.1 h
Latitude change38.0900°
Longitude change-26.6400°
ℹ️ What this tool does & how it works

The air line between the two is 5,049 km (3,137 statute miles, 2,726 nautical miles). It comes from the haversine formula on the two coordinate pairs the page carries — Nairobi at -1.2900° S, 36.8200° E and Tunis at 36.8000° N, 10.1800° E — using the IUGG mean Earth radius of 6371.0088 km. Leaving Nairobi toward Tunis you start on a true bearing of 329.7° (NNW); because the Earth curves, that heading drifts as you go.

How the Nairobi and Tunis distance is worked out

Two points on a sphere are separated by the shorter arc of the great circle that passes through both of them, and the haversine formula is the numerically stable way to get its length: it converts the latitude difference and the longitude difference into a single chord ratio, takes its square root, and multiplies by twice the radius. Written that way it stays accurate even for pairs a few kilometres apart, which is why it is still the standard in navigation code. The radius used here is 6371.0088 km, the IUGG mean radius; on the true WGS84 ellipsoid the same Nairobi–Tunis arc differs by a few tenths of a per cent depending on the route's orientation, which is well inside the error of a city-centre coordinate.

What that number means for an actual trip

It is the distance a bird flies. A 5,049 km line becomes roughly 6,564 km of road once hills, borders, river crossings and bypasses are counted — the 1.2 to 1.4 multiplier is the usual empirical range, and this page does not pretend to know the road you would take. Air distance is closer to the figure above, though airline routings, wind and holding add time to the 337 minutes a perfect 900 km/h cruise would take. Rail sits between the two. The latitude and longitude changes in the table show why the line is not simply "north" or "east": a 38.09° shift in latitude is about 4,233 km, while the same number of degrees in longitude shrinks with the cosine of the latitude.

Both positions, exactly

Nairobi, Kenya (Africa): 1° 17′ 24.0″ S, 36° 49′ 12.0″ E — decimal -1.29, 36.82, GeoHash kzf0tv5t0. Tunis, Tunisia (Africa): 36° 47′ 60.0″ N, 10° 10′ 48.0″ E — decimal 36.8, 10.18, GeoHash snx1rehze. Those two pairs are all this page needs, and everything above is derived from them; nothing is fetched, and the coordinates you can edit in the form are recalculated by your own browser, so a different pair costs nothing and stays on your device.

Part of Everyday Tools. Like everything on tukuk.org: free, no account, no tracking.

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