STRATEGY GUIDE

How to guess a flight destination from four numbers

Every round of AviationGuesser gives you the same four pieces of evidence: aircraft type, altitude, ground speed and heading. That is enough to get within a few hundred kilometres almost every time, once you know what each one rules out. This is the order to use them in.

1. Aircraft type sets the range envelope

Start here, because it is the strongest filter and it costs nothing to apply. Type tells you the maximum distance the aircraft can plausibly be flying, and the answer has to be inside that circle.

• Turboprops, ATR and Dash 8 family - short regional legs, usually under 800 km
• Regional jets, CRJ and Embraer E-Jets - domestic and near-international, rarely over 3,000 km
• Narrowbodies, A320 and 737 family - up to about 5,500 km, and the long-range variants will surprise you
• Widebodies, 787, A350, 777, A330 - intercontinental, and they are almost never doing a short hop
• Freighters - any distance, odd hours, and hub airports you would not expect

2. Altitude places the flight in its profile

Below about 25,000 feet the aircraft is either climbing out or coming down, which means one end of the flight is close to where you are looking. That is the most valuable altitude to see, because it puts a hard bound on the answer.

Between 30,000 and 40,000 feet the aircraft is cruising and you are somewhere in the middle. You have the most information and the least certainty. Above 40,000 feet you are usually looking at a business jet or a lightly loaded widebody late in a long flight.

3. Heading is the strongest clue and the biggest trap

Project the heading forward and you get a corridor. Everything outside it is gone. The trap is that great circle routes look bent on a flat map, so a flight from North America to Europe spends most of its journey apparently pointed well north of where it is going.

The fix is to think of the heading as an arc that curves toward the pole, not a straight line across the projection. A westbound transatlantic flight over Ireland pointed northwest is almost certainly going to the eastern seaboard, not to Greenland.

Also remember that a heading is a snapshot. Aircraft dogleg around weather, follow oceanic track systems and get vectored during approach, so a single reading can sit twenty degrees off the average course.

4. Ground speed adds the wind

Ground speed is airspeed plus whatever the atmosphere is doing. A narrowbody showing 560 knots over the ground is riding a strong tailwind, which over the northern hemisphere usually means eastbound. The same airframe at 380 knots is pushing into one.

It is a small clue on its own and a good tiebreaker when two candidate airports sit on opposite sides of a corridor.

5. When the geometry runs out, bet on the hub

Scheduled traffic is heavily concentrated. A handful of airports per region handle a large share of the movements, so when two candidates are geometrically equal, the busier one is the better guess by a wide margin.

This is the single highest-value habit in the game. It converts a coin flip into a favourable bet, and over a few hundred rounds it is worth more than any individual clue.

The mistakes that cost the most

Reading the heading as a straight line on the flat map. This is the expensive one and it costs whole continents.

Ignoring the airframe. A regional jet cannot cross an ocean no matter how convincing the heading looks.

Spending hints on rounds that are merely hard. The origin hint collapses most rounds instantly, which is exactly why it is worth saving for the ones you genuinely cannot read.

Sitting on a guess past the point of new information. The time bonus is real, and a pin at forty seconds beats the same pin at five.