Empirical Earth · Flight & Navigation
Circumnavigation, great circles & the “emergency landings” book
The claim
“Emergency landings and long routes only make sense on a flat-Earth map.”
What is measured
Circumnavigation returns you to your start after ~one circumference, and “impossible” diversions are just the nearest airport on a globe’s great-circle route. The flat-Earth map that explains the northern cases makes Southern-Hemisphere flights impossibly long, so it refutes itself.
What would show this is wrong
a verified nonstop Southern-Hemisphere route (e.g. Sydney–Santiago) whose flight time matches the enormous distance a flat azimuthal map requires.
Sources
- Circumnavigation & great-circle routes. A closed east–west loop spans one Earth circumference (~40,075 km at the equator); shortest air routes follow great circles, which bow poleward on fla link
- Magellan’s crew lost a calendar day circling the globe (1522). The survivors of the Magellan–Elcano voyage kept a gapless daily log, yet on reaching Cape Verde in July 1522 found the local d link
- Earth’s equatorial bulge and the farthest summit from its center. Rotation makes Earth an oblate spheroid: mean sea level at the equator (6,378.1 km from the center) is about 21 km farther o link
- Southern-hemisphere nonstop flights. Direct Southern-Hemisphere routes such as Qantas’ Sydney–Santiago (~7,060 miles, ~12 h 40 m, the longest scheduled nonstop between two Southern-Hemispher link
- Circumnavigations of the Earth. After the 1519–22 Magellan–Elcano voyage, the globe was circled by Francis Drake (1577–80), Thomas Cavendish (1586–88), Joshua Slocum solo (1895–98), Francis link
- The Antarctica Cup Yacht Race. A nonstop yacht race circumnavigating the Antarctic continent; solo sailors including Fedor Konyukhov and Lisa Blair have completed the loop in roughly 100 day link
The full entry, with the working →