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So ive always been curious, is there any reason why a plane that takes off from jfk for instance,,en route to china/japan heads basically straight for the north pole for the first several hundred/thousand miles? Also, if a plane took off from the west coast to the middle east, which way would it fly?
Shortest route. If you take a piece of string and a globe and measure a north to china route vs a straight west route you'd find the north route to be shorter. Same reason why when a flight leaves for Europe the fly up the Canadian coast towards Iceland. It is an instance when an arc is shorter than a straight line.
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Originally Posted by SD4020
Shortest route. If you take a piece of string and a globe and measure a north to china route vs a straight west route you'd find the north route to be shorter. Same reason why when a flight leaves for Europe the fly up the Canadian coast towards Iceland. It is an instance when an arc is shorter than a straight line.
All depends on ow you look at it, the *arc* can also be seen as a straight line !
hence the shorter distance.
The *straight line* as seen on a flat map, is actually a larger arc !
Regardless of semantics, an arc is always longer than a straight line.
The shortest route across the globe is known as a "great circle" route. It is basically what an "equator" dividing the world into two equal halves connecting the two departure/destination points would be. Get a globe, put a string around the real equator in order to get a correctly sized string and tie the ends together so you have an "equator-sized string". then choose the two points that represent your departure/destination points and move the strint will be the route to be flowng so it runs through the two points, but is also an arc that just fits tightly around the globe dividing it into two equal half-spheres. That's your great circle route. For example, the route from Los Angeles to London basically flies over my city-Billings, Montana! I see jets going from southwest to north, northeast to London all the time.
In addition to the 'great circle,' there are various 'tracks' that used over the Pacific Ocean and north Atlantic to decrease flight time and increase efficiency. Very specific routes exist for the early morning international arrivals from Europe, the PM departures from the US to Europe, and for flights to/from Asia. There tracks are usually distributed beforehand to air traffic controllers so the aircraft can be vectored appropriately.
I don't know if there are any direct flights from the West Coast to the Middle East. There are flights from Atlanta to Dubai and Chicago to Abu Dhabi (and probably more flights I can't think of) that fly east bound, though.
You can use this website to play around with great circle maps.
Input two airport codes and hit "map" and it will give you a pretty good map of the expected route a flight will take.
Here is JFK to Tokyo for example. You can see a large portion of the flight occurs over the pole. Looking a globe will help you visualize it further.
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