Why planes do not fly in a straight line
The world map you have been staring at in your classroom for eleven years of school distorts the true state of affairs.
Our world is not as depicted on school maps. Pilots know the secret, which is why they never fly in a straight line...
The Earth is spherical. Any attempt to represent it on maps like those hanging in our classrooms results in stretching the scale of certain territories.
For example, Africa is the second-largest continent by area (29.2 million square kilometers) after Eurasia. Despite this, on a political map of the world, it appears much smaller than North America, even though the latter is almost 10 million square kilometers smaller than the “Dark Continent”. Greenland is almost 5 million square kilometers smaller than Australia, but on a map, it appears larger than the “kangaroo country”.
Related to this is the fact that if we tried to plot a straight route from, say, Tokyo to Lisbon on such a map, we would be surprised to learn that real-life pilots do not fly that way. Superimpose their actual route on a flat map, and we will see a significant deviation from that straight line. It is as if the pilots were taking a long, curved detour.
So why do not planes fly in a straight line? It is for the same reason: the map does not reflect reality nor does it reflect the Earth’s spherical shape. Therefore, most real-life routes appear curved on flat maps.
In maritime navigation and aviation, such an arc is called a great circle. Experts use this term to describe the shortest distance between two points on the Earth’s surface. And despite its curved shape, it is the shortest route from point A to B on the surface of our planet.
