(Posted 16th September 2026)
Probably more than we think. Two weeks ago, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the use of the Equal Earth projection, encouraging a move away from the Mercator projection that has shaped the way generations of us have visualized the world. Much of the discussion has understandably focused on Africa. On the Mercator map, land masses closer to the poles are greatly exaggerated, while Africa, Latin America and other regions closer to the equator appear much smaller than they really are. There is an important historical and political discussion behind this. But looking at the new map, I found myself thinking about something else: air connectivity.
Maps shape our intuition about distance.
And the intuition created by the maps we grew up with can be surprisingly misleading.
Africa is enormous.
A flight from Europe to Southern Africa is not so different in distance from a flight from Europe to parts of Southeast Asia. Yet psychologically, Africa can somehow feel much closer.
There is one very real advantage: north-south travel generally creates much less jet lag than travelling a similar distance east-west. But that doesn’t make the kilometers disappear.
The same applies within Africa.
When we discuss intra-African connectivity, it is easy to look at a conventional world map and imagine relatively modest distances between African markets. Crossing the continent from east to west can mean many hours in the air. Flying from Addis Abeba to Dakar is over 6,000 km, while flying from New York to Los Angeles is less than 4,000 km…
Latin America presents a similar problem. Countries and markets that appear relatively close together on the map can be separated by very substantial flying distances. Who, outside of Argentina, would have a clear concept that a flight between Buenos Aires and Bogotá, is well over 6 hours of Boeing or Airbus?
Of course, airline network planners don’t make route decisions by looking at a classroom map. They have great-circle distances, block times, aircraft performance, operating costs and sophisticated network models.
But air service development is not only about models.
It is also about how we intuitively understand markets, regions and opportunities.
Could it be that a world map that represents the true scale of continents more accurately will slowly change that intuition too?
Africa may stop looking like a collection of relatively nearby markets and start looking more like what it really is: a vast continent where distance itself is one of the fundamental challenges to connectivity, and one of the strongest arguments for aviation.
Sometimes changing the map doesn’t change the world, but it may change how we see it.
