I am a pilot. I just flew from NY to Hong Kong. I looked at the flat earth map. If the earth was flat, navigation like we do it on every flight would be impossible.
We have discussed this problem here before - the FE'ers are generally reluctant to respond to these issues.
There is one response I got.
We'd been talking about the Qantas airlines' published travel times around the Southern Hemisphere (er: "Hemiplane"). The distances you see on the "standard" FE map (the one mostly shown on the Wiki) says that the 747 would have to be traveling at 2.1 times the speed of sound to meet their schedule to non-stop destinations in either South Africa or South America...and that they'd run out of fuel about halfway to their destination.
The SINGLE meaningful response (sorry, I forget who said it) was that the Jetstream carries their aircraft to the destination.
(I'm not defending that answer - I merely pass it along!)
To my mind:
* It doesn't explain how they make it back again - the jetstream doesn't blow in both directions!
* It doesn't explain how Qantas could be unaware of this effect and blindly go on assuming the earth is round...despite seeing odd islands and ships whizzing past the window at unreasonably large speeds.
* It doesn't explain how large surface shipping companies (without the benefit of the jet stream) don't discover that their ocean trips routinely take three times as long as they "should".
So it wasn't exactly an acceptable answer...but it was the only one we got that actually addressed this perfectly reasonable question.
But maybe you, as a long haul pilot, could point out additional flaws in that response?
I also have a question: Does the effect of the coriolis force have a practical bearing on how pilots navigate long-haul north/south routes? The FE model cannot reproduce the coriolis effect - and maybe there is yet another avenue of disproof (or perhaps PROOF!) that can be found by considering that?