I’m taking a trip to Asia. It’s 85 days long and I’m going to take a few airplane rides. If you think I’m bragging then you you either don’t fly a lot or you think I fly First Class. I don’t look forward to flying. Granted, I’m a pilot. I’ve owned some airplanes. I’ve flown a few that I didn’t own. But, I don’t enjoy flying as a passenger in a commercial airliner. If I flew First Class in a larger plane it might be different. I might sit back and enjoy the free champagne and snacks and be able to actually get some sleep in some comfort. But, I don’t fly First Class. I’ve had some of my friends tell me I’m crazy for not doing so on those 10+ hour flights. I tell them some people have to suffer for their art form and I’m hardly cutting my ear off or something. I fly “cattle car”, not First Class, and I just get some very uncomfortable feelings in the largest muscle in my body and they are relatively short-lived. I can deal with it.

But this post isn’t really about me or the largest muscle in my body. It’s about air miles and, more precisely, about air mile calculators.  On this trip I started wondering about the number of miles I was going to fly in the air. So, I went looking for air mile calculators. What I found was that there are a few of them out there. The three main ones I found, WebFlyer, MileCalc and Air Miles Calculator all produced about the same mileages. The issue was how they did it. I didn’t like WebFlyer because it did not have some of the airports I was utilizing on this trip in its database. That meant no answer as to how far it was when I tried to use it. That’s bad. I didn’t like Air Miles Calculator because it required extra work to enter an itinerary. I don’t really need to do a lot of extra clicking or data entry to find what I need. I want a smooth and virtually effortless experience to obtain something as simple and straightforward as knowing how may miles a flight from Point A to Point B takes. The third entry on the list, MileCalc, does that and does it efficiently. That was all I needed to know. Plus, it does complex routes. Put in five airports and get a total mileage for the trip. It’s the one that gets my vote for Best Air Miles Calculator.