I mean, not flying over other countries actually makes sense in this case because we’re talking about military aircraft. Flying those into another country’s airspace could be considered an act of war.
Going from Moscow is gonna take a LOT longer than from Vladivostok
In the flat Earth proposed by the above picture? Moscow should be faster, shouldn’t it? Even if they’re avoiding flying over other countries, enter the Baltic Sea near St Petersburg and navigate the Danish Straits; or if that’s too close, fly North of Norway & Sweden, either way, much shorter than from Vladivostok.
If we’re talking the real world, it depends on which part of Alaska you’re talking about. To Anchorage, it’s definitely “a LOT” longer. Along the northern coast of Alaska though, it’s actually…well, still longer, but by a surprisingly small amount, thanks to Moscow being so much further north than Vladivostok and able to take the northern passage.
The more you think about it, the better/worse it gets.
They couldn’t fly from Japan to Hawaii even using the more reasonable route. They were brought nearer using aircraft carriers.
The Doolittle Raid launched longer-range bombers from US carriers to hit Japan and they were lightened up to the max (dumped their guns and anything else non-essential) and planned from the get-go to ditch over China because flying back would be impossible.
Being able to fly a bomber halfway across the World was beyond WW2 tech.
Wouldnt that be the line it would fly actually? If you go from one side of the earth to the other its fastest over the poles or something no? Or because of map projections? Idk that much about maps.
Judging by eye on the map projection OpenStreetMap uses, the direct line between Japan and Hawaii is about one quarter of the westbound straight line between Japan and Hawaii.
Ignoring the fact that you would go east to reach Hawaii from Japan, because it’s in the northern hemisphere, it would actually curve up not down, and because both japan and Hawaii are close-ish to the equator the curve would be relatively flat.
Fun fact because every country charges you for every nautical mile flown in their airspace, you will actually get lines that zigzag and are less fuel efficient because they are paying less for airspace miles. Example. If you fly from Chicago to Paris or Dubai, you don’t actually head east first, you first head northeast into Canadian airspace and bypass the New England area because Canadian airspace is cheaper than U.S. airspace.
it’s mathematically provable that the shortest path between any two points on a sphere will be given by a so-called “great circle”. (a great circle is basically something like the equator: one of the biggest (greatest) circles that you can draw on the surface of a sphere.) i think this is pretty unintuitive, especially because this sort of non-euclidean geometry doesn’t really come up very frequently in day to day life. but one way to think about this that on the sphere, “great circles” are the analogues of straight lines, although you’d need a bit more mathematical machinery to make that more precise.
although in practice, some airlines might choose flight paths that aren’t great circles because of various real world factors, like wind patterns and temperature changes, etc.
You can’t fly directly in a commercial aircraft. The airspace has routes and points you have to follow. Smaller planes don’t always have to, but big planes almost always do. Altitude is one of the determining factors.
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