Just read somewhere that the shortest path between two locations is an arc and not a straight line! eli5 how an arc is the shortest path for planes.
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Straight lines don’t exist on the surface of a sphere. The closest you can get is a great circle- a circle with the largest possible diameter. If you have a globe and a piece of string you can try pulling the string tight between two points and observing the path of the line over the earth. When a globe is “”unrolled” into a flat map the great circle arc can sometimes be distorted into a shape that seems counterintuitive.
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