quoting Tom Bishop
This is just not true.
1. You can measure the ground or water passing below with optical sensors or radar.
2. You know your travel time, your engine performance, and your fuel usage repeated thousands of time in different directions.
3. Meteorologists and oceanologists are not ignorant of air and water currents. These have to be factored in to be economically competitive.
1. These commercial planes aren't navigating by radar. Who has measured the distance between two distant points with radar and found it to match the distances predicted by RET lat/lon coordinates?
2. A travel time is meaningless unless you know how fast you were going. Repeating the journey doesn't tell you how fast you were going. To know your average engine performance would require knowledge of how fast your craft is truly traveling, and this is influenced by currents and any Round Earth lat/lon coordinate system misinformation you compare it to (ie. GPS).
3. Even if a pilot knows that he is flying against 5 knot headwinds, there is no way to know how much it is fluctuating as to get an accurate speed estimate.
[/quote]
Well when you put it like that everything is a lie.
If we can't agree on at least one constant this conversation will never go anywhere.
[/quote]
You hit it on that one. Tom can't admit to any constant at all. He will never concede any data like miles, gps, flight times, distances, speeds etc. If he did his flat earth would mysteriously roll up into a globe.
Notice he always speaks of the North Star, totally ignoring navigation in the southern hemisphere. I wonder what FEers down under use as arguments?