For example, if I were in Tangier, Morocco, and wanted to fly to Whangarei, New Zealand (the antipode on the globe) – wouldn’t it be about the same time to go up instead of across?
ETA: Thanks so much for the detailed explanations!
For those who are wondering why I picked Tangier/Whangarei, it was just a hypothetical! The-Minmus-Derp explained it perfectly: *Whangarei and Tangier airports are antipodes to the point that the runways OVERLAP in that way – if you stand on the right part if the Tangier runway, you are exactly opposite a part of the Whangarei runway, making it the farthest possible flight.*
In: 2270
There exist plenty of north south routings. E.g. from Europe to places in Africa. Similarly there are lots of connections between Asia and Australia as well as between NA and SA.
They simply aren’t as frequent as the much more popular routings across the Atlantic and Pacific in east west direction.
The main reason for this is population density. There simply aren’t as many people living in the southern hemisphere (13%) as is in the north (87%), and that results in less popular north south routing pairs.
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