This is right on point. There are so so so many people in Flight Simulator forums that have no idea about this. The GPS flies a great circle route, which when you're doing something like LAX - Rome is quite curved, and they keep insisting it is "wrong".
Just the obvious observation. We have past the era of Columbus, and we have great navigation tools such as the GPS in combination with automation of navigation in three dimensions plus the time domain…! It’s rather easy to navigate the great circle with today’s modern equipment! But yeah, the theory and manually finding the correct waypoints is a task for the dedicated person
Thanks for this video, but I want to point out a problem with your terminology about distances. In the graphic shown at 0:36, it shows large distance measurements labeled as "large scale" and short distances as "small scale". Actually, a large scale map would be one that shows a smaller area, or shorter distances than a small scale map. This is because the word "scale" refers to the ratio between a measurement on the map and the distance it actually represents on the ground. So in a small scale map, of say a continent, would have a ratio of perhaps 1:10,000,000, and a large scale map, of perhaps a neighborhood, would have a ratio more like 1:1000. If you changed the labels to large distance and small distance, it would avoid the issue.
@@sephefox Yes, I agree. Most people don't understand that the scale is represented as a fraction, they see the area depicted as if it was a magnification.
@@karhukivi exactly. 1:1000 or 1/1000, is a relatively large map scale, which would only be able to show a small area, compared to 1:100000 or 1/100000, which would be a much smaller fraction, or smaller scale, and show a much larger area of the earth. Do you work in GIS? Not too many people think about these things, lol.
Great circle routes are not “curved” paths. An aircraft flying a great circle route would be flying a straight line to its destination as viewed from above on a lambert conformal projection chart. Due to the navigation aid we use “magnetic” the mag course will continually change, so we are only correcting for the magnetic difference along the route…..but the aircraft does not change heading either left nor right, we only can fly a straight line if we consistently correct for mag differences. It only “looks” curved because you’re not looking straight down on the flight route. You have to look at the route as an orthodromic representation. “3D”
So on the 3d model the great circle route was actually straight, and the earth is in fact 3d then why wouldn’t you be able to just fly straight then? Just a tad confused.
When flying along a great circle route, pilots do not have to turn their planes left or right to stay on course. But, throughout the flight, the apparent compass heading of the plane will change, because the compass is aligned with the meridian great circles, which are not parallel to each other (they intersect in the north and south poles). Here is a video on on the subject. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-T41niy7sbgA.html
@@marsa7600 This has nothing to do with profitability, but with international regulations. Namely, an airlines from Spain is not allowed to fly directly from Chile to South Africa, but only from Chile to Spain, and from Spain to Chile. if there was no such regulation, there would be situations where big international airliners would establish lines between profitable destinations from smaller countries, and they would push out smaller domestic airliners.
It is flat, cannot use a great circle given Mercator projection map is flawed you would need to use the accurate map Gall-Peters projection. Even then we cannot see any curvature and Neil D Tyson admits no one should be able to see the curvature unless you're 128,000 feet! Lies and coverup
"a Plane on a "sphere" - Yeah, let's "pretend" Earth is flat for a while, do all these calculations, and then go back to the "globe" and say Earth is a spinning ball in space!
