Why do airplane routes look funny on world maps?
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? If you want to fly, boat, bike, or drive, following a straight line saves time and money. When you look at aircraft routes on flight tracking sites, does it look like airliners take the long way home? Why do they fly those curvy routes across the oceans and continents?
Spherical Globes and Flat Maps
The earth, as we know, is a sphere (more accurately, a spheroid). Maps are flat. Imagine trying to cut and stretch a globe into a flat rectangle. Tough job! Cartographers need to distort the shapes of land masses in order to fit the entire planet on flat paper. The maps pilots use, like road maps, only display a small portion of the planet so the distortion is minimal. This distortion is what causes straight lines to look curved on maps.
What’s a great circle route?
The shortest route between any two points on the earth’s surface is called a great circle. Although air routes look curved on flat maps, airliners do try to fly straight lines between cities. Exact routes vary due to winds, flight rules, and political borders (we don’t fly over certain countries). There are trig formulas for doing great circle calculations, but it’s more fun to find them with a globe (or other spheroid, like a basketball) and a piece of string.
Pick two cities on the globe, like Tokyo and Los Angeles. Stretch the string between the two cities and wiggle it around until you’ve found the shortest distance. That’s it! You’ve found the great circle route (and preferred airline or ship route) for those two cities. If you were to slice the earth along your great circle line, the earth would be cut into two equal halves. Try different cities around the planet. You might be surprised at the routes you discover. The above map shows a typical route between Tokyo and Los Angeles. If you try the string trick, you’ll see that the route displayed on the map is pretty close to where your string falls.
You might have noticed that great circle routes between North America and Asia pass very close to Anchorage. This makes Anchorage the perfect location for fueling aircraft, changing flight crews, and sorting cargo. Many airlines take advantage of Anchorage’s location to optimize North America/Asia operations.
Polar Routes – Over The Top of The World!
Cathay Pacific’s ultra long-haul New York to Hong Kong flight looks really strange on a flat map. It appears to head north, turn west for several thousand miles then south to Hong Kong.
Is this really the route the airplane flies? You bet! The area near the top of the map is extremely distorted. The straight course represents the short portion of the flight that transits the north pole. Yep, this flight flies over the Arctic Circle near Santa’s Workshop. The total flight distance is 7000 nautical miles (nm). The segment over the pole (that looks really long on the flat map) is only 1200nm, or less than 3 hours of this 15 ½ hour flight. When you look at the route on a sphere, it makes more sense. Try stretching a string on a globe between New York and Hong Kong. Sure enough, the shortest distance passes close to the North Pole.
Polar trivia: Russia opened four cross-polar routes in 1998. Prior to this, polar flights were difficult to arrange due to poor communications in Siberia. Cathay Pacific flew the first cross-polar passenger flight in July of 1998 from New York to Hong Kong. This was also the first flight to land at Hong Kong’s new Chek Lap Kok Airport.
Great Circle Resources Need more knowledge? Look no further…
Great Circle Mapper: This online resource does all the work for you. Enter two cities and Great Circle Mapper displays the great circle route on the most appropriate style of map. Plenty of customization options for Map Geeks.
Wolfram MathWorld Great Circle page: If you want to work the formulas, Wolfram MathWorld is the place for you! I’m a product of the public education system, so I’ll stick with my beach ball and string… and my Flight Management System.
Wikipedia Great Circle Navigation Page: Nice overview of the great circle navigation and a few formulas to play with.
Wow a nice post ken, I’m now AeroSavvy of airline routes 😉 I wonder what are the countries that you don’t fly over.
Hello, Sandaru. Thanks for the comment!
The countries we avoid often change, sometimes month to month, based on current security and safety concerns. The list also varies by airline. Currently, my company avoids Syria and Crimea overflights due to recent political unrest. All U.S. carriers must avoid Iraq overflights, but carriers based in other countries can still overfly it. Both Lufthansa and Emirates regularly fly routes over Iraq. Last year, we avoided North Korean airspace for about a month.
The world is always changing. This is part of what makes international flying challenging and fun!
okay!! thanks 🙂
This is great…I’ll have to use the “tilting” method to explain the great circle routes to the students here at Vance AFB. Never thought of explaining it like that. Well written article.
Jake,
Thanks for the nice comments! Glad I was able to give you another way to look at great circles. Thanks for reading!
A follow-up question: When following a great circle route, is the magnetic bearing constantly changing in the cockpit or do they stay on one heading for a period of time?
Great question!
When flying a great circle route, our track across the ground appears straight on our map display, but the magnetic course we fly is always changing. If we fly a great circle from New York to LA, we start out heading northwest and arrive in LA heading southwest. From our point-of-view in the cockpit, we have flown a perfectly straight line and we haven’t turned (other than to correct for changing winds). It’s pretty cool to watch.
Thanks for reading!
Your heading on arrival to LA would be southwest i.e. around 225°
Thanks for catching my typo! Fixed.
how do i show a picture of the plane going the direction that i plan to travel?
Great Circle Mapper (http://www.gcmap.com) is a great way to display the shortest (but not the exact) route that your flight can take.
You can also track your flight or similar flights on http://www.flightaware.com
Thanks for reading!
Ken
Hello Ken,
Nice explanation in a very interesting way. I have few questions.
1. Has any pilot tried taking a route that maps a straight line instead of Great Circle path ? Has anyone tried flying from Asia to the U.S. on a straight line path ?
2. In one of the comments you have mentioned: ” From our point-of-view in the cockpit, we have flown a perfectly straight line and we haven’t turned “. How is it possible that though you head North-West while starting NewYork, you end up heading South-East while landing at LA, though you do not turn ?
Thank you
Hello,
Question 1: “Has anyone tried flying from Aisa to the U.S. on a straight line path?”
YES! Every day. Remember that a great circle path is the ONLY straight line between two points on the planet.
Forget about paper maps. There are several different types (projections) and they all provide a distorted view of the earth. Take a look at the globe illustrations above. The “curved” line only looks curved when you looking at it from an angle. When you look at the route from directly above, the line is straight. When flying this line in an aircraft, the nose of the jet (assuming no wind) points straight down the line, pointing at the destination. The aircraft never turns. As you pointed out, the compass and our heading move significantly as we scoot across the globe, but the aircraft remains flying the straight line. The reason for heading changes is that we are using magnetic or true north as our heading reference point. If it were possible to move magnetic north to Hong Kong and use Hong Kong as our “North” reference, we would maintain the same heading all the way Hong Kong.
You can prove this for yourself using a globe and a piece of string as I did in the article. Play with it a bit. Stretch the string in a straight line between New York and Hong Kong (or anywhere else). Looking directly above it, it should appear straight.
Great questions! I hope I answered them in a way that makes sense.
Thanks for reading!
Ken
A comment, if I may, rather than a question. It’s sort of a corollary to all that you’ve said, and it looks at the picture sort of the other way round. I’ve looked at some of the questions asked; I’m not sure if this will confuse or clarify.
If you start flying exactly north or south anywhere in the world, and you keep flying straight, you’ll continue to fly north or south (at least until you get to the North or South Pole).
If you start ON THE EQUATOR, and fly exactly east or west, and you keep flying straight, you’ll continue to fly east or west.
Begin flying in any other direction–or begin flying east or west, somewhere away from the Equator–and you will have to turn gradually if you want to keep the same geographical heading (I deliberately avoid calling it the same “direction”).
So as a broad example, if you’re in the northern hemisphere and you set out flying east (or, for that matter, northeast or southeast), you have to keep bearing left in order to maintain east (or northeast or southeast).
I think a good way to picture this, in your mind or on a globe (NOT a paper map!) is to consider a trip going always east at a high latitude–i.e., one of the circles very near the North Pole. It’s easy, then, to see that from the plane’s point of view, it’s flying in a circle going left.
As another exercise, imagine that you are 50 feet from the North Pole. You face east, and start walking–always east. You’ll have to walk in a circle roughly 300 feet (more exactly, 314.15926… feet) around, constantly turning left. If you do not, you will walk east for ONE INSTANT, and then you’ll be going more and more south of east. Walk/swim the same way for long enough, and you will pass a point 50 feet from the South Pole–walking east for one instant before heading more more north.
Hi Stephen,
Very nice explanation! It might help someone who is struggling with the concept of navigating on a sphere.
Thanks for the comment!
Ken
If you are flying between two points exactly on the equator, is a great circle route possible, or must you simply fly due east or west to the destination?
Hi Pete,
That’s a fun question. The equator is a great circle path. So any route along the equator is a great-circle route. It’s the only place on earth where you can fly exactly east or west and be on a great circle route.
Thanks for reading!
Ken
Hi, Why are great circle routes shorter than straight line routes??
Hi Lindsay,
Great Circle routes are straight lines. They are the shortest distance between any two points on the globe. Great circle routes appear curved on flat paper maps because of the distortion caused when trying to project a convex surface onto a flat piece of paper.
Thanks for reading!
Ken
If you’re talking about a “straight line route,” it seems fairly certain that you’re talking about drawing a straight line on a paper map. And the key thing–the simplest point–to keep in mind is:
When you map the (nearly) ball-shaped Earth onto a piece of paper, SOMETHING has to be wrong! That’s just a mathematical fact. And in fact, there’s a whole mathematical discipline about it.
We can, up to a point, choose what’s right and wrong by choosing the “projection”–the way we transfer the earth to the paper. We can choose a particular point of view for getting a clear and correct view–of something we wish to have a clear and correct view of.
I’m not a cartographer, nor do I know the mathematics involved (not by a long way). But it seems to me that you cannot devise a projection that will show the shortest distance between ANY two spots as a straight line.
ON THE OTHER HAND, take any Great Circle route–showing as a curved line on a map that we are used to. It should be possible to devise a projection–a picture of earth on a flat piece of paper–that will show THAT ROUTE–and generally not other routes–as a straight line. And that new map will be just as valid–can represent the earth just as accurately–as the maps we’re used to.
Another point occurs to me. Choose any point on earth. For argument’s sake, let’s make it your own home. There’s a projection–a way to map the earth on a flat piece of paper, that will show the Great Circle route–the shortest travel distance–between THAT POINT and any other point in the world as a straight line. It wouldn’t work for most other trips
It would be a map that almost certainly, nobody has ever done before. But the kind of projection is actually fairly common. If you’ve ever seen a map that has the North Pole in the middle, and the rest of the world stretching out in a circle, that’s the way it would be done. Except that it would have your home in the middle instead of the North Pole.
In the end, I think that if someone is puzzling over this enigma, the ONLY way to get one’s head around it is actually take a globe (can you still find those??), and start choosing pairs of points. And stretch a bit of string connecting those points. And consider, then, how you would draw a straight line on a standard map (north at the top, south at the bottom). You can see it above, in this thread, but seeing it on a computer screen or in a book is no substitute for actually putting your hands on a globe and turning it to look at it in different ways.
Hi Stephen,
Great comments! I agree: As I mention in the article, the very best way to understand paths on the earth is to grab a globe or basketball and a piece of string. Flat maps have distorted our perception of the earth and its proper proportions.
Thanks for reading!
Hello, Ken. It seems I lost the first-try text, so I’ll try again.
Please look at this flight: https://ru.flightaware.com/live/flight/CPA812/history/20180209/1005Z/VHHH/KBOS
As you see, the route deviates quite a lot from the great circle: 14,316 km instead of 12,821 km.
I have suggestions why this is done:
1) a twin-engine aircraft should not be too far from airports if one of the engines fails so it avoids flights through the polar region;
2) the route takes into account jet streams that blow eastward and allow you to fly at a speed greater than 1000 km/h (instead of the usual 850).
Can you say if these factors are significant, and whether there are any other factors that influence the choice of a real route.
Thanks,
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
Twin jets fly polar routes every day. Cathay Pacific has a daily flight from JFK to Hong Kong that usually flies north from New York, across the arctic circle then south to Hong Kong. The reason your HKG-BOS flight flew over Alaska was to take advantage of strong tail winds.
Thanks for reading!
Here’s a fun riddle that take a spin off of this concept:
A person leaves their house and travels south.
After a while they take a 90 degree turn to the right and travel some more.
Then they take another 90 degree turn to the right and travel some more, ending up back at their house.
Who is this person?
That’s a classic! Not sure who they are, but I’m pretty sure they started their journey from the North Pole. 🙂
My father is a merchant marine so as a kid I learned about great circles from the nautical point of view. The charts they used for navigation were cylindrical projections – where a straight line represents a path of constant bearing. Aviation maps are typically conical projections – where a straight line approximates a great circle route.
This was the early 90s and I learned how to plot the ship’s course with a pencil, drawing compass, protractor, and ruler. When they would plot a great circle course from NY to London, they divided it into 7 or 8 “rhumb line” segments of constant bearing (relative to true north). To follow this path, they would adjust their bearing about once per day where each waypoint was located along the great circle path.
Just as pilots take tail winds into account, sailors consider the effect of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. Additionally, since a great circle path tracks closer to the poles, they would have to consider the season and would only travel as far into the North Atlantic as safety would allow. Luckily, planes don’t have to deal with icebergs.
Another way to picture a great circle is a ring that has the same diameter as the sphere. Imagine the different ways you can stretch a rubber band around a ball so that it splits the surface in half. Any portion of that rubber band represents a great circle path. This helps illustrate how the equator along with any given line of longitude are all great circle paths.
Thank you for taking the time to write this article. I think pilots would be the best people to prove or disprove flat earth theory. However it looks likes the flight paths are automatically calculated. How can this proven one way or another?
The spheroid shape of the earth was proven with overwhelming evidence over 2000 years ago. I’m not going to address something so ridiculous.
forensichealing2012, you should go to youtube channel Wolfie6020 – he is a pilot who spends a lot of time to make flat earthers a little bit smarter
Ken, love the site.
How do you keep track of when to use true or magnetic headings when flying polar routes?
Hi Nick,
I haven’t been trained for polar ops, so I only know general info. The 767 has a Heading Reference switch with “Normal” and “True” positions. In the “Normal” mode, the navigation system handles everything automatically when navigating with LNAV (on an FMC route). In general, north of 73°N and south of 60°S “True” is used.
Here’s a reference from Boeing: http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_16/polar_nav_by_model.html
Explaining stuff in the Boeing reference is beyond the scope of my knowledge.