Hi! I’m 22 years old, originally from South Africa but now living in England (have been for 12 years)
Now, when I moved I was 10 and of course knew nothing about the Earth being flat.
It’s only recently out of pure curiosity that I’m starting to think twice about what we are taught as children.
My flight from Johannesburg, South Africa to Manchester, England had a stop over in Dubai. This was so weird to me when I looked on Google Maps. Why, instead of just going from South Africa straight up to England (since if you look on a normal run of the mill map - the two continents are above each other) did my flight go in a curve?
It makes no sense to me, I’m sure there’s a reason for it but it still messes with my head.
It seems logical that all flights would go straight to their destinations, but it ends up not working that way.
Planes have a limited range, so for some flights you have to make at least 1 stop because you just can't fly non-stop without running out of fuel.
So you would think, why not put a stop right in the middle? Why detour all the way to Dubai?
And that is because airports are expensive, especially ones that can handle the large long-haul planes. Big runways, big terminals. A massive investment.
So you can't just put huge airport hubs everywhere, you have to pick and choose. Dubai is an obvious choice for a large hub, so it makes sense to put one there. So your overall route is longer than if there was an airport in say, En Nahud in Sudan but since not many people would want to go to En Nahud, nobody is going to build a massive airport there.
You can think of it this way. Lots of people fly between Johannesburg and Dubai. And lots of people fly between Manchester and Dubai. Flights go back and forth every day. So if you want to get from Johannesburg to Manchester, the cheapest solution for an airline is to put you on those two flights that are already scheduled and taking people. Even if a plane could make it all the way, why schedule a whole airplane if the routes already exist and there likely will be empty seats they can use for you?
It's pretty much just economics. It's much cheaper to throw people on existing flights between major hubs than to create new routes direct for every single destination.
I lived in a town with a small airport, it has ONE flight that only went back and forth to a big nearby hub airport. I could fly to anywhere I wanted, but had to take that small plane to the hub first because why would hundred of airports schedule flights direct to my small town when they could just drop me and everyone else coming from around the country off at a hub and ship us all back on a single, cheap plane.