From what I know the vast majority of nautical travel is measured in knots. It just feels a little ancient for this world of technology. Wether it’s a ship or amphibious craft the speed is always knots. We have pretty reliable GPS and satellite nav nowadays even to the point you can buy a GPS speedometer for less than $50 for your car. I completely understand the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” philosophy but surely it would make life just that little bit easier for sailors and captains to have their speed in MPH/KPH?
In: 579
Because they have always done that so all speed rules, installed equipment, etc use a knot.
A knot is a nautical mile per hour and a nautical mile is 1/60 of the latitude of eath. Because of this knots is a very good speed for navigation on the open seas where you define location with coordinates in degrees minutes and second. One minute of latitude is one nautical mile.
So all existing information about how long a sea jury is are in nautical miles. There is very seldom any need to converter between nautical miles, miles, and kilometers on the sea.
If you measure the distance on earth on a globe and get how many degrees it is a multiplication of 60 gives you the distance in nautical miles. Divide it by the speed in knots and you get the travel time. Long-distance aviation as sea usually follows the shorted path on a globe, this is called the great circle distance.
You can do that measurement with a sting you stretch out on a globe and then then it is not hard to get its lengths in degrees.
A change to another unit would have no advantages at but disadvantages from the point of navigation.
For the same reason, a lot of flights use natural miles and knots for speed. It makes sense when you are not bound by the path of a road.
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