Hi! I'm new here. I looked for this site after receiving a couple of interesting phone calls from one of your followers this past week. Got me to thinking...
I flew from San Francisco to Beijing (Boeing 747) in 2014. It was a long flight - a little over 12 hours. It followed a fairly straight line according the FES map (along the coast of the western US/Canada then through Alaska over to Siberia and down the eastern coast of Asia until we got to Beijing. I had a window seat, and could verify many of the land forms as we overflew them. Anyway, I copied the FES map over to my laptop and measured (with a digital ruler) the distance between San Francisco and Beijing. I obtained a value of 1.84", so the plane was covering about 0.153" per hour. The planes fly at a verifyable speed of roughly 500 knots. Make sense so far??
Just for the hell of it, I looked up the flight time from Sao Paulo to Johannesburg on the same type of plane. 9 hours. But on your map, the distance is much greater - 2.89". So those planes are seemingly covering distances at a much higher rate of speed - .321" per hour. I'm not very smart in math, but if I do a simple ratio, those planes would have to fly in excess of 1000 knots - that's supersonic!! According to Boeing, that's also an impossible rate of speed for a commercial airliner.
The FES has been around for quite some time, and a lot of geographical measurements have seemingly been made. So while you don't claim the map to be definitive, one would imagine that it must be at least close to accurate. How do you explain this anomaly? Does the map scale change in different sections of the map?? This doesn't make sense to me.