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Flat Earth Investigations / Re: What is the true map of the earth?
« Last post by RonJ on May 15, 2024, 10:46:19 PM »So, you have one sole instance to offer as a counter and it happens to be in a place you would have been able to visually detect a referenced landmark perhaps matching the flight map.
How in the world would this translate to a transoceanic flight having little if any similarity to the flight you cite?
If you need many more descriptions of long-haul airline flight experiences, I have plenty for you.
While I was working, I took lots of long-haul transoceanic flights. Some were up to 15 hours long. On those flights I sat in business class or first-class seats. There was always a map with the aircraft’s position and ground speed displayed on the screen in front of me. Sometimes there was even a forward-facing camera allowing me to have the same outside view as the aircraft’s captain on my display. If I wanted to double check I could pull out my GPS receiver and have a 2nd source of speed & position data. This worked OK especially when I was in a window seat. I am an experienced commercial pilot/ship’s officer/ and navigator myself and was never surprised when I could confirm the aircraft’s position with landmarks below. We would always fly a great circle route to save fuel and sometime would go way up into the Artic on flights from the USA to Asia. There were times when we did divert for a refueling stop before reaching our destination but that didn’t happen very often. When it did happen, there was always bad weather along the way and the pilot would make some diversions to avoid thunderstorms and typhoons. We did once land in China to refuel on the way to Hong Kong but there were frequent storms along the way, plenty of adverse head winds and the weather was foggy in Hong Kong. It made sense to be safe and have plenty of reserve fuel in case a diversion or a holding pattern was necessary near the end of the flight due to the unpredictable visibility at our final stop.
The bottom line is that I have the experience of many hundreds of international voyages by sea and air in my working days. You always knew your position and speed over the ground very accurately. If someone tells you the contrary, they are wrong.