Take the circular cylinder
Its first fundamental form is . The universal covering parametrization is therefore a local isometry from the Euclidean plane, after scaling the first coordinate. By geodesic preservation by a local isometry, every geodesic on the cylinder lifts to a straight line defined for all . Thus the cylinder is geodesically complete. It is noncompact because is unbounded, and it is not a plane because one of its principal curvatures is .