📏 Sydney to Auckland

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2,156 km · 1,339 mi
Great-circle (haversine, R = 6371.0088 km)2,155.5 km
Miles (international)1,339.4 mi
Nautical miles1,163.9 nmi
Initial true bearing105.6° ESE
Flight at 900 km/h (no climb, taxi or wind)144 min
Drive at 80 km/h, non-stop26.9 h
Latitude change-2.9800°
Longitude change23.5500°
ℹ️ What this tool does & how it works

The air line between the two is 2,156 km (1,339 statute miles, 1,164 nautical miles). It comes from the haversine formula on the two coordinate pairs the page carries — Sydney at -33.8700° S, 151.2100° E and Auckland at -36.8500° S, 174.7600° E — using the IUGG mean Earth radius of 6371.0088 km. Leaving Sydney toward Auckland you start on a true bearing of 105.6° (ESE); because the Earth curves, that heading drifts as you go.

How the Sydney and Auckland 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 Sydney–Auckland 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 2,156 km line becomes roughly 2,802 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 144 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 2.98° shift in latitude is about 331 km, while the same number of degrees in longitude shrinks with the cosine of the latitude.

Both positions, exactly

Sydney, Australia (Oceania): 33° 52′ 12.0″ S, 151° 12′ 36.0″ E — decimal -33.87, 151.21, GeoHash r3gx2f5ub. Auckland, New Zealand (Oceania): 36° 51′ 0.0″ S, 174° 45′ 36.0″ E — decimal -36.85, 174.76, GeoHash rckq2g8m5. 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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