I was on a flight looking down at the cars on the highway and it hit me, like the higher you go the higher the radius is to cover the same distance as ground transportation. I’m sure there’s a cool reason and history. To make up for the extra fuel to get up that high and the extra miles added. Anyone? Does it have to do with less air pressure. And the efficiency aerodynamic wise? Or noise pollution? Visual pollution? I just always took it as a non ask, “We’re this high, cuz we’re in a plane. Duh”
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It’s more efficient and takes *less* fuel, because the air resistance is lower since there’s less air. That’s absolutely the most important reason, but there are some other benefits.
One is that it gives a large amount of wiggle room for “lanes”. There are well-established routes between airports. By giving a high ceiling, planes have plenty of room to go lower to avoid other planes. To be clear, they’re not getting anywhere near each other anyway, but the margins for safety in commercial flights are very large.
Going so high also puts them above the vast majority of bad weather. Tall storm clouds can get high enough to interfere with commercial flights, but *most* storms don’t really get that high. Wind at that height tend to be dominated by big, slow weather fronts and predictable jet streams, so there *usually* isn’t much turbulence and wind shear is rare.
It’s good for safety in the event of a loss of power. All planes can glide without power to the engines, but commercial planes are big and heavy so their glide slope is not great. The higher up they are, the more time they have to look for and get to a safe place to land. Every flight plan – commercial or otherwise – includes information about airports along the route and which among them can safely accommodate an emergency landing of a plane of its size and weight, so pilots always know where they can go. But they still need to get the plane there, and without power height = distance.
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