By The claim going around comes from the insider Konsolum: flying across the whole of Leonida in a helicopter takes six to seven minutes. Treat it as what it is — one person’s number, with no official figure behind it and no way to check it until November. I’d normally leave that where I found it.
What makes this one worth a paragraph is that it can be measured against something solid. YouTuber TGG spent three hours with the game at Rockstar North and put the size question to the developers directly, Rob Nelson among them. The answer he came back with: the map is twice the size of GTA 5’s and three times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2’s, and Vice City on its own is twice Los Santos. Crossing GTA 5 by air is usually clocked at around three minutes. Double the map, double the flight — six to seven minutes lands exactly where the developers’ own comparison puts it.
Which is the strength of the claim and also its weakness. Anybody with those two public numbers can multiply three by two and arrive at the same answer without ever seeing the game, so “it adds up” is a long way from “somebody measured it.” Flight time is a soft ruler anyway: it moves with which helicopter you take, which diagonal you fly, and whether the water between the Keys counts as crossing the map.
So file it as plausible arithmetic rather than a measurement. What the size of Leonida actually rests on — the estimates, the comparisons and which real Florida each region is built from — sits on our GTA 6 map page, and it gets revised the day someone can fly it themselves. That day is November 19, and a stopwatch will settle this in an afternoon.