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 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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