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« on: October 09, 2018, 04:15:55 AM »
Most people who have a regular land based job don't have any reason to even think about whether the earth is flat or round. In my case the subject is vital to the jobs I've had in my 50 year career. Now I'm a retired Merchant Marine officer and I sailed world wide. I've been around the world a couple of times, in each direction. Earlier I was considering being a airline pilot and did earn a commercial pilots license, but the shipping companies paid a whole lot more so I went to sea. That doesn't mean that I didn't fly much. I had my own electronics business for 23 years and flew my own airplane often on business. The first five years of my career I worked for the local TV station as a transmitter engineer. Having said all of the above I've learned some stuff that only makes sense if you think about it and if the earth is a globe. My local TV station has a 1000 foot tower not far from where I'm currently living. I used to work there 50 years ago. The TV station spent a whole lot of money putting up that big tower because they knew that the higher they went the more watchers they could get and the more that they could charge for advertising. A global earth model would mean that their nominal coverage are would be approximately 40 miles. In a flat earth model that coverage would have been a whole lot more. When I was flying my own private plane I would often cruise at about 7 to 9 thousand feet. In those days (before GPS) I used the VHF VOR system for navigation. Typically a VOR station could be used at about 100 miles at the altitudes I used. This was due to the curvature of the earth. A flat earth would have afforded me the luxury of tuning in a station near my destination, rather than flying from station to station. When I went to sea I worked on large ships. Usually the length was from 750 to 1000 feet. Our height of eye was about 130 feet above sea level. You could usually see the mast of another on coming large ship appear at about 15 miles away. We had the use of more than our eyes and a telescope. The last ship had 3 separate radars. Our 10cm radar would usually see the ship come over the horizon before we could see it with our eyes. It would appear as a very weak target and grow in size and strength as we approached the other vessel. You had to be a bit closer to see a smaller fishing boat. That same radar could see Mt Fuji in Japan at a much larger distance because it was a lot higher. Even mount Fuji would appear to sink into the sea as we departed Japan. You would loose site of the port city way before you would loose side of the mountain, even though the mountain was farther away. These types of personal experiences could not be reconciled with a flat earth theory. Don't get me wrong, a flat earth would be a whole lot easier for everyone in a lot of ways, but unfortunately, my personal observations didn't match that theory. I was never afraid of falling off the edge of the earth. Maybe because as a kid, we lived overseas and traveled the world during vacations. My sister picked up the same tendencies and was in Antarctica a couple of months ago and actually returned home without any difficulty.