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
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-+
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.
Flying in a straight line on a flat map would be flying in a curved line on a round map.
There are multiple reasons such as those posted above.
But also safety reasons.
ETOPS (Extended Operations) requires 2-engine passenger aircraft to be within 60 minutes of an airport. 4-engine passenger aircraft must be within 180 minutes of an airport.
Socialism is the longest distance between two points.
Evidently, they never had one to begin with.
Me? I’m baffled why the world’s longest election takes place in Arizona.
Too bad an airplane can’t poke its way slightly into space and just let the world spin beneath it until it is over its destination.;-)
They are called great circle routes. The earth is a sphere, folks...not flat.
As some have alluded to it is because of the concept of the great circle. In short, the great circle can be imagined by cutting the globe in half with the the center of the globe, the origin and destination on the plain created by cutting the globe in half. As on a flat plain the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; the shortest distance between two point on a sphere is on a flat plain.
Its sherical geometry.
IOn fact there are no straight lines that can be drawn on the earths sevice. Contraru to the popular believe that the shortest distance between two points is a staright line is a myth. Buckminster Fuller pointed this out repeatedly.
The longer the line the more curved it has to be.
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This is not a straight line, it is curved, but it has to be much longer for you to perceive the curvature.