Posted on 11/12/2022 12:51:46 AM PST by Saije
How's this for a detour? Over on TikTok people are losing their minds as to why the world's longest flight travels in an over-exaggerated curve and not in a straight line from New York City to Singapore.
Travelling at a whopping distance of 9,537 miles, people have had their brains twisted over its questionable logic.
TikTok user Travel With DJ documented the curved details of the world's longest non-stop commercial flight. The Singapore Airlines flight takes off from John F. Kennedy (JFK) airport and lands in Singapore Chani Airport.
Travelling from Singapore back to New York is thought to take 18 hours and 50 minutes, according to Upgraded Points.
(Excerpt) Read more at virginradio.co.uk ...
The flight takes what is known as a great circle route that reflects the curve of the earth. On a flat sheet of paper, it looks like a curve even though it is the shortest and most efficient route between two points on a globe.
It looks like to me that it might follow the Gulf Stream to save on fuel.
Because the earth is um, you know, like, round
when i go to asia the plane is routed north over alaska and russia to Shanghai instead of a straight shot. at first I thought well maybe its actually a shorter distance. but then it occurred to me it maybe to is to keep the plane above land just incase an emergency. lot easier to find the wreckage on land than the open sea!
but this one has me wondering again!
My faith in humanity diminishes a little more each day it seems. Has no one ever looked at a globe?
Great circle is a straight line
It's an arc ... shortest distance over the surface of a sphere. A straight line would go through Earth.
>The explanation is that TikTok users are stupid.
And they vote.
A tunnel straight through the earth that was wide enough to fly a plane through would be shorter. I have a son (nearly 16) who could probably easily and quickly construct something of the sort in Minecraft. It would take the seven year old a while, but he is a clever lad.
What a waste of time (he posted on FR).
It would go into space. The rate the earth curved downward is 8” to the mile.
just did the math and up and over is 5000 miles shorter. JFK to egypt is 5,603 miles. Egypt to Singapore is 8,263 total of 14,000-+
#13 It was the Germans that bombed Pearl Harbor!
I hope that guy is just trying to be funny.
Most people are also in disbelief when they discover that South America is 8X times larger than Greenland.
Mercator maps are great for straight line shortest distance plotting, but for realistic geography, not so much.
And it wasn’t over!
Heh what I was thinking
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