How to Calculate Ground Speed While You're Traveling in a Plane

As a pilot you must know how fast you're actually moving across the ground. This tells you your true speed. But not everyone is a pilot, and this information is still a needed piece of information. Many people would like to know how fast they are traveling over the land as they are flying across the country. This is also important information, because you can figure out if your arrival time is accurate compared to what the pilots up front tell you. They're not going to tell you you're going to be late till they absolutely know for sure that that is what is going to happen.

The first thing that you have to know is the basic math of the situation. This is something everyone knows, they just don't look at things this way. If you're driving down the road going 60mph or miles per hour or miles/hr, you're traveling 60 miles in 1 hour. So if we were traveling down the road and I said we just went one mile in a minute, you'd know whether your gauge was working or not that we were traveling at 60mph(60 minutes in an hour. 1 mile in a minute. 60 Miles in 60 minutes) (http://www.purplemath.com/modules/distance.htm)

Now that you understand that basic math, that you actually already knew, we can continue with how to figure out how fast you're barreling through the sky on a 737. You're going to need a map of the place you're flying over. Find where you are on the map and what way you're flying. The easiest way to do this is to pick the biggest thing around and find that on the map.

Find out the scale of the map, that's the ruler looking thing at the bottom of a map. With something flat and relatively long measure how long a mile, or 10 miles is. Wait till that one thing you picked out is directly out your window.

Watch the scenery pass for 1 minute. Look out and place a mark on the map where you ended up on the map from the spot you choose. Be careful, this is really hard in the middle of the country since there is a lot of nothing and corn. Measure the distance that you have traversed in that minute. Therefore you are flying that many miles in 1 minute. Then multiply it by 60, and that's how many miles you are flying per hour. (http://www.flightsimaviation.com/rule-of-thumb/20_Calculate_Groundspeed_by_Timing.html)

You have now just figured out your ground speed, and you now know how to figure out ground speed. Congratulations.