How far is Athabasca from Fort McMurray? Here's the quick answer if you are able to make this entire trip by car without stopping.
Nonstop drive: 193 miles or 311 km
Driving time: 3 hours, 6 minutes
Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Fort McMurray, Alberta and Athabasca, Alberta. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest distance is actually the "great circle" distance, or "as the crow flies" which is calculated using an iterative Vincenty formula.
Flight distance: 157 miles or 253 km
Flight time: 49 minutes
The straight line flight distance is 36 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.2x of the flight distance.
Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/4th of the time it would take to drive.
This is a relatively short flight in a private plane, but you might be planning to book a commercial flight. In that case, your travel time would really need to include how many minutes to get to your local airport, wait for security, board and taxi on the runway, land at the other airport, and get to your destination. Scroll down to see a more realistic calculation that takes into account all these factors to get a more accurate estimate of your actual flight time.
In the quick calculation above, we assumed you had a private plane and just wanted to know the time in the air from city to city. But for most of us, we're going to be flying on a commercial airline (whether it's first class or coach). So that means we really need to account for all the extra travel time getting to the airport, waiting for our flight, and making it to the destination.
To give you a better estimate of real-life travel, we've put together a flight itinerary with actual airports. Eventually you'll be able to customize this plan, choosing your own airports and flights. But for now, here's an example we've selected to give you an idea of how traveling might work between airports.
Departure airport: Fort McMurray Airport (YMM)
Arrival airport: Edmonton International Airport (YEG)
With the airports selected, we can estimate the travel time to and from the airport, based on how far the airport is from downtown.
Getting to the airport: 23 minutes
Getting to your destination: 295 minutes
Now finally, let's look at an example flight from YMM to YEG and figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, and time to taxi on the runway.
Commercial flight time: 49 minutes
So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Fort McMurray to Athabasca including time spent getting to/from the airports, an estimated wait time of 2 hours at the airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, and the actual flight itself.
Total travel time: 8 hours
To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner:
Trippy has a ton of information that can help you plan your trip to Athabasca, Alberta. Start by reading the Trippy page on where to stay in Athabasca. Click the button below to explore Athabasca in detail.
The distance is the same either way if you're flying a straight line (or driving the same roads back and forth). But for a real trip, there can be plenty of differences so go ahead and check the reverse directions to get the distance from Athabasca to Fort McMurray, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.
If you happen to know Fort McMurray, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Fort McMurray!
More info on this route:
drive from Fort McMurray to Athabasca
road conditions
alternate routes
Google driving directions