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
A few things that come to mind:
1) Practicality. In your example, you list Tangier and Whangare, as a city pair. This is an incredibly long and specific journey, with probably not that much of a market. If you were an airline, it wouldn’t make much sense to operate this flight, hoping enough people in Tangier would buy tickets on your airplane to Whangere. So what you do instead, is sell tickets from Tangier to some place like Singapore, and then have those passengers /connect/ on a different airplanes to various locations in the south pacific.
Even super long flights from big cities, Like New York (Newark) to Dehli, are mostly connecting passengers. Passengers fly from all over the U.S. and Canada to Newark, and then get on the big plane to Dehli. From there, maybe some stay in Dehli, but lots connect to other destinations in South East Asia.
2) Safety. Every airplane is certified to fly a certain distance “off shore” from a suitable landing field in case of emergency. Some aircraft are certified to fly further distances from land than others. In the early days of commercial jets, only four engine airplanes could fly extended distance off shore. As turbine engines became more reliable, it was eventually lowered to 3 and then 2 engine airplanes, as they got certified for such operations (ETOPS). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Originally, the north atlanic routes follow the east coast of the US and Canada, then over Greenland, then Iceland, then finally over the UK, and into Europe. This routing was established decades ago. Interestingly enough, if you took a piece of string across a globe, and tried to make the straightest line you could between New York and Paris, while still maintaining.. say, /three hours of flight time on a single engine/ you would roughly get the same line as the north atlantic routes we have today.
3) The jet stream. There are two ways to cross the Atlantic and Pacific ocean.
North Atlantic Crossing routes (NAT Tracks) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks
And Pacific crossing routes (PACOTS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Organized_Track_System
These routes are published evey 24 hours based on the ever moving jet stream. The design is to keep east bound flights in as much tail wind as possible, while keeping west bound flights in as little head wind is possible. This saves time, but most importantly, fuel.
4) Airspace. Geopolitical issues extend well above Earth into the sky into an undefined ceiling. For instance, if you were a US based airline, you would generally be prohibited from overflying Ukraine, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Yemen, to name a few nations. During the cold war, Anchorage Alaska became a major cargo hub, which it still is today. This was partly because overflight of the Soviet Union was prohibited. Anchorage was the closest major airport to Asia, it could reach Japan, China, and South East Asia without overlying the USSR.
Latest Answers