Background The poor reliability of traditional screening tools to identify a potentially difficult airway makes the difficult laryngoscopy and tracheal intubation rate remains at 1.5–13%.The hypothesis is that fat pads affect the view during direct laryngoscopy so the increasing thickness of pretracheal soft tissue or pre-epiglottic space could be strong predictors of difficult laryngoscopy as the mobility of the pharyngeal structures is impaired. Upon that, we aimed to evaluate ultrasound-measured distance from skin to epiglottis for prediction of difficult laryngoscopy in Egyptian population.