How far is Shanghai from Lyon? Here's the quick answer if you have friends taking shifts as driver so that you can make the entire trip by car without stopping.
Nonstop drive: 7,220 miles or 11619 km
Driving time: 121 hours, 32 minutes
Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between Lyon, France and Shanghai, China. 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. For a long distance, this appears as a curve on the map, and this is often the route that commercial airlines will take so it's a good estimate of the frequent flyer miles you'll accumulate as well.
Flight distance: 5,819 miles or 9364 km
Flight time: 12 hours, 8 minutes
The straight line flight distance is 1,401 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 1/10th of the time it would take to drive.
This is a fairly long flight, so unless you have a Gulfstream G650 or your own Boeing or Airbus, you might be booking 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: Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport (LYS)
Arrival airport: Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)
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: 35 minutes
Getting to your destination: 60 minutes
Now finally, let's look at an example flight from LYS to PVG 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: 12 hours, 8 minutes
So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from Lyon to Shanghai 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: 16 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 Shanghai, China. Start by reading the Trippy page on where to stay in Shanghai. Click the button below to explore Shanghai 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 Shanghai to Lyon, or go to the main page to calculate the distance between cities.
If you happen to know Lyon, don't forget to help other travelers and answer some questions about Lyon!
More info on this route:
drive from Lyon to Shanghai
road conditions
alternate routes
Google driving directions