How far is Richmond from New Castle (Indiana)? Here's the quick answer if you don't sleep at all, or you have a friend with you so each person can drive some of the way, letting you make the entire trip by car without stopping.
Nonstop drive: 590 miles or 950 km
Driving time: 9 hours, 39 minutes
This is a pretty long drive, so it's not very realistic to drive nonstop. To get a better idea of how long this road trip would really be, scroll down to calculate how many hours it would take if you drive with stops.
Now let's assume you have a private jet and you can fly in the fastest possible straight line between New Castle, Indiana and Richmond, Virginia. 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: 459 miles or 739 km
Flight time: 1 hour, 6 minutes
The straight line flight distance is 131 miles less than driving on roads, which means the driving distance is roughly 1.3x of the flight distance.
Your plane flies much faster than a car, so the flight time is about 1/7th 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.
Let's say you're actually planning a road trip to Richmond, and you want to stop along the way to rest. If it's a real road trip, you might want to check out interesting stops along the way, eat at great restaurants, and maybe even find a hotel to stay overnight. That's what Trippy is perfect for, helping you figure out travel plans in detail.
Based on the length of this trip, we think you could spread out this fun road trip over more than one day.
Road trip: 2 days of driving
With the full itinerary planned out, we can estimate your total travel time for this trip.
Travel time: 10.5 hours on the road with 1 overnight
Itinerary
Drive for about 1.5 hours, then stop in Dayton and stay for about 1 hour. Next, drive for another 2.5 hours then stop in Gallipolis and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 1 hour then stop in Charleston (West Virginia). Stay overnight.
The next day, drive for about 1 hour, then stop in Beckley and stay for about 1 hour. Next, drive for another 53 minutes then stop in Lewisburg (West Virginia) and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 1 hour then stop in Lexington (Virginia) and stay for 1 hour. Drive for 1 hour then stop in Charlottesville and stay for 1 hour.
Finally, drive for about 1 hour and arrive in Richmond.
To see all the details on this itinerary, including recommended restaurants, hotels, and things to do along the way, check out the full road trip planner:
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: Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG)
Arrival airport: Richmond International Airport (RIC)
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: 214 minutes
Getting to your destination: 20 minutes
Now finally, let's look at an actual flight from CVG connecting through SFB and arriving at RIC flying on Allegiant Air LLC. We can figure out how long it would take to fly including take-off and landing, time to taxi on the runways, and an average layover time of about 2 hours.
Initial flight time: 1 hour, 58 minutes
Connecting airport: Orlando Sanford International Airport (SFB)
Connection flight time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
So now we can finally get an idea of the total travel time from New Castle (Indiana) to Richmond including time spent getting to and from the airports, roughly 2 hours at the departure airport for TSA security lines and waiting at the gate, plus the connecting flight with a 2-hour layover.
Total travel time: 12 hours
To see the details on this flight plan, including recommended airports, airline, and route, check out the flight planner: