Empirical Earth · Flight & Navigation

Flight times, great circles & polar overflights

The claim

“Flight times, routes and 'no Antarctic flights' prove a flat-Earth map.”

What is true

Airline flight times are asymmetric between east and west, sometimes by an hour or more on the same route, and almost no scheduled service crosses the deep Antarctic.

What is measured

Long southern routes like Sydney–Santiago take the short great-circle path that only exists on a globe, and can’t even be drawn on a flat-Earth map.

What would show this is wrong

a direct southern-hemisphere route (e.g. Sydney–Santiago) taking far longer than the great-circle distance predicts.

Sources

  1. Jet stream. NOAA / National Weather Service — mid-latitude westerly jets and their effect on east/west flight times. NWS JetStream link
  2. Great-circle navigation. Standard navigation/geodesy: the shortest path on a sphere and its appearance on Mercator projections. great-circle navigation link
  3. Polar & Antarctic overflight and ETOPS. FAA polar-operations guidance (2001); ETOPS diversion rules; documented Antarctic-region airline routings (e.g., Qantas QF28, 2023, ≈74° S). Aviation link
  4. The world’s longest nonstop flights follow great circles. Singapore Airlines’ Singapore–New York service (~15,300 km, ~18 h 50 min on the A350-900ULR) is the longest scheduled nonstop, routi link
  5. Global Navigation for Pilots. Dale De Remer and Gary Ullrich (Aviation Supplies & Academics), the definitive textbook on long-range and trans-oceanic flight navigation since 1993, teaching g link
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