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
Get a globe and a string. Put the ends of the string on any two cities. That will be the basic route an airplane will take. Some deviations for ATC corridors or jet stream boosts but that is basically it. And they do fly longitudinally. The straightest line between two points on a globe is a curve, and that curve goes very polar on long flights.
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.
Planes do this though – find yourself a beach ball (earth) and a piece of string (route) and you will discover what we call a great circle route.
Most plane routes do follow this, but with some variations for wind and other factors. 2-engined aircraft (which is the most common today) also have to be within a certain distance from an adequate airport, meaning some regions are out of bounds for them.
But again, the premise is that planes do exactly what you suggest – it just looks differently on a flat map – because the earth is not flat.
Here’s a short video about why flights don’t cross Antarctica (they do cross the Artic)
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They do when it makes sense to do so. There is quite a bit of traffic over the North pole or at least close to it. China to the NY/Chicago and likewise Middle East to US West Coast. The Southern hemisphere is less populated so less demand for direct flights but there are some flights that get close to Antarctica, Sydney to Santiago for example.
This is the concept of small circles and great circles. The shortest distance between 2 points on a globe is a great circle. If you got a map globe and stretched a string between 2 points on it that would be the shortest distance. it would also be a part of a huge line that was the circumference of the world. If the 2 points were both on the equator it would be obvious to see that line or if they were on a line of longitude you could easily follow it. But if they were not on the equator and still were at the same line of latitude as each other following the line of latitude would be a smaller circle but not the shortest distance.
Great Circles are the most distance efficient route for travelling across the surface of a sphere. This is a circle with the centre of the earth as its centre (think of the equator, but rotated so the start and end points are on the same circle.
It’s the same concept as a straight line on a 2D surface, but takes the 3D curvy nature into account.
If somewhere is a true antipode, then there could be more than 1 great circle – in this case, you’d fly the route that was most wind efficient (Flying West to East for example) and that kept you closest to airports for diversion.
There’s a cool site for showing great circle maps – [Here’s one for Tangier to Whangarei](http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=TNG-WRE)
They do, for example New York to Hong Kong.
Shortest route is over the north pole, around 8,000mi
The Cathay Pacific non-stop routes take this. Al “alternative” horizontal route that went from like New York to Alaska to Japan to Hong Kong so you remained near populated areas would be about 9,000mi
So more fuel/longer travel time.
Different routes priorities different things because of winds, safety, international air space, fuel, flight time etc
I live in Michigan and was really confused one time when I saw a Muslim praying in the direction of Mecca and he was facing Northeast. Took me a while to figure out why that was a correct direction
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