Eli5: Why do some flights go so far north before crossing the Pacific Ocean?

Question

There is a flight going from Dallas Texas to Tokyo but they appear to be going all the way to Alaska before crossing and coming back down.

In: 1

Answer 1

>There is a flight going from Dallas Texas to Tokyo but they appear to be going all the way to Alaska before crossing and coming back down.

A direct flight from Dallas to Tokyo will graze Alaska. It’s a straight line, the shortest path. If whatever flight map or tool you happen to be checking right now doesn’t *show* it to be a straight line it’s because you’re seeing a map projection – an approximation that does not fully represent the non-Euclidian geometry you have to work with when traveling large distances on top of a globe. Projections always lose some sort of aspect of real world geometry in trying to portray a 3-dimensional surface in a 2D-plane.

In short: The map is incorrect because it *has* to be incorrect. The real-world path is a straight line.