The best country to be in for a 4-hour flight to a new country

I realised during my long flight from the US recently that around 4 hours on a plane is the time where I start to feel tired, such that I’m not going to feel particularly fresh or able to do anything on the other end. Lucky, I thought, that the UK is quite well connected to other countries. I wondered just how many destinations I could fly to if I were to just hop on a plane in London, where the (direct) flight lasted a maximum of 4 hours. But then this leads to a more interesting question. If I were to pick the ‘major’ airport city in every single country in the world, which city would allow me to travel to the widest set of unique countries?

Data

Google was the main source of my data. In most cases, I chose the largest city from a given country, or the one with the largest airport (if this was not in the largest city), and pulled up a list of all non-stop flights less than or equal to 4 hours in duration. The goal was to see how many unique countries I would be able to fly to from each of these cities. I excluded colonies or overseas territories, like UK owned islands in the Caribbean. It’s quite likely that there are some errors, because Google does not list all destinations for larger airports. Instead you have to manually search from a map view, which is less likely to be exhaustive because of human error. Finally, for some countries where there were multiple large airports in cities close to each other, I combined them. For countries like the US and Russia, where major cities are spread out quite far, I used multiple cities (but kept them separate).

Results

So which city do you want to be in if you want to be able to travel to the widest range of countries in 4 hours or less? Istanbul. You can fly to 52 different countries in 4 hours or less! The second is quite a way away: Vienna allows you to fly to 39 different countries in 4 hours or less. Finally, all of Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, and London allow you to fly to 36 different countries in 4 hours or less.

Here is the full list (the countries that have no airports are omitted):