Feet to Meters

Aviation is the field where feet survive most firmly. Air traffic control in most countries assigns altitudes in feet, so a cruising level of 35,000 ft is 10,668 m and the 10,000 ft line, below which the sterile cockpit rule bans non-essential talk on the flight deck, is 3,048 m. Pilots convert when flying into the few airspaces that use meters, and passengers convert when the seat-back map shows one unit and the captain announces the other.

Mountain heights come in both. Mount Everest is 8,848.86 m according to the 2020 China-Nepal survey, which is 29,032 ft. Denver, the Mile High City, sits at 5,280 ft, which is 1,609 m, and a 14,000 ft Colorado peak is 4,267 m.

Since the 1959 yard and pound agreement, the international foot has been 0.3048 m exactly. The United States, however, kept a second unit, the US survey foot of 1200/3937 m, about 0.3048006 m, for mapping and land records. Over a single foot the gap is two millionths, but over a state-wide coordinate grid it adds up to meters, which caused real surveying errors.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Geodetic Survey retired the survey foot at the end of 2022, so from 2023 one foot means 0.3048 m everywhere. Old deeds and maps still carry survey-foot values; for anything else, 0.3048 is the only factor you need.

A standard US ceiling of 8 ft is 2.44 m, and a basketball rim at 10 ft is 3.05 m. For a person 6 ft tall, multiply by 0.3048 to get 1.83 m.

Heights written as feet and inches are where people slip. 5 ft 6 in is not 5.6 ft; it is 5.5 ft, because the inches are twelfths. Convert the inches with the factor 0.0254 and add them to the feet in meters: 5 ft is 1.524 m, 6 in is 0.1524 m, together 1.676 m. Going the other way is easier on the meters to feet page, which splits the answer into feet and inches.