computing air miles
 

need to know where i can find out the number of air miles from dallas to lisbon

Welcome to FlyerTalk.

http://www.chicago.com/airliners/gc.html says 4765.

To generalize the question a bit more, how are FF miles calculated, point-to-point or by routing?

On most airlines, it's based on beginning and end by flight number. So if I fly CHA-CLT-MCI on one flight number, I get only the miles for the distance between Chattanooga and Kansas City. If it's two separate flight numbers, I get the 500 minimum for Chattanooga to Charlotte, then the distance from Charlotte to K. C.

Yup, I got that part for the minimum mileage part, or two legs on the same flight number (say 400+300 = 700, not 1000).

BUT, say for DFW-LAX (which DL, AA, and UA say is 1,235 miles), how is that calculated?

Distances are calcualted from airport to airport using GPS cordinates. This would be the shortest flight path between the two city pairs.

Thanks!

http://www.webflyer.com/milemarker/milemarker.htm

is super easy to use!

There seems to be no precise answer to that. The airlines use various figures for city-city distances and booking engines use various distances, and they frequently don't agree.

UA, for example, uses ITN as its booking engine, but UA's system allocates miles that can be quite different from what ITN reports. Sabre's idea of what the distances are seems to be almost (but not always) the same as UA's.

It's a mess, and I wish they'd just decide on one way to calculate it instead of the three or so different ones going around.

UA's and LH's mileage calculations differ.

LH calculates miles from 'town' to 'town' (Example: Frankfurt to New York, crediting/charging the same miles to any of the three NYC airports: JFK, EWR, LGA).

UA 'calculates' point to point (individual airports).

This difference can work for or against me/you. I get more miles on LH's miles&more program flying the 'shorter' FRA-JFK distance. But when calculating for a rtw trip my mileage charge, I prefer UA's system 'charging' me less miles for that distance.