Have you ever been on a long flight and noticed that the path of the airplane seems to be going out of the way toward the North Pole instead of directly to your destination? There is a very simple reason for this.
Despite what many people believe, the answer actually has nothing to do with safety. The real answer is because going north may actually provide a shorter route. This is called Great Circle Navigation. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the shortest route between two locations may appear much longer on a flat map. For a better understanding of this phenomenon, let’s use STK to take a trip to one of our international locations, Singapore!
You can use STK to model some possible routes from New York to Singapore. The map below shows two possible routes, a typical route (blue) that flies north and a route that appears more direct on a flat map (yellow).
In this image, the yellow route looks much more direct and the blue one seems out of the way. If you saw this map on your flight, you might be stuck staring at your screen wondering why your pilot decided to take an impromptu visit to the North Pole. However, in reality the blue route is significantly shorter. You can get the general idea from the picture of the globe window below.
In this image, the two routes at least look roughly similar in distance. But let’s check the actual values computed by STK.
You can find this in the Report & Graph Manager. The Scalar Calculations data provider presents the distance calculated along the ground track of the aircraft. Here are the values presented for the two routes:
Typical Route Aircraft (Blue)
Time (UTCG) Scalar (nm)
------------------------ -----------
28 Aug 2017 16:00:00.000 0.000000
29 Aug 2017 15:44:04.141 8293.189971
| “Direct” Route Aircraft (Yellow)
Time (UTCG) Scalar (nm)
------------------------ -----------
28 Aug 2017 16:00:00.000 0.000000
29 Aug 2017 18:49:52.629 9375.274175
|
Notice the time difference between the two routes. The northern route saves you over three hours of vacation time. That’s a whole extra trip to the mall, thanks to your pilot.
And who doesn’t like shopping?
