convert geographic coordinate system [lon, lat] to Cartesian [X,Y] preserving The great-circle distance in python

Question

(true newbie here,) I have a (large) geo-data set containing [lat ,lon] and I'd like to convert it all to a flat two-dimensional surface (x,y).

The result needs to preserve the great-circle distance between each two points (what I mean here is the shortest distance by airplane travel between the two points).

I'm really not clear if this is doable accurately, what is the algorithm and is there an out of the box code doing this in Python.