[Iceman]

Hey, I have a decent idea for a couple simple investigations that can be turned into an effective test.

First, crowd-fund a leading FE-er to take the chartered flight to the south pole, where they get to spend 5-6 days there trying around, and would have free time to conduct some basic studies (magnetic inclination and declination mapping as an example)

Second option: convince one of the many agencies operating in antarctica, that they should install a camera and livestream the ascent from any one of the dozens of weather balloon launches. This would (depending on cloud cover) effectively show the shape of the Antarctic continent, one way or the other.

Chartered trips to the south pole are just over 50k USD. I'm not sure what the costs of adding a video stream to a weather balloon launch would be.

[OutsourcedGuru]

In the Antarctica version of this and within a FE context, your weather balloon should perhaps bump into a containment wall if it flies directly at something which should be the South Pole. If you think about fluid dynamics for a moment I would think that it would be exceedingly unlikely that the balloon would on its own take this path. If there is a boundary wall then wind currents should force anything traveling towards that boundary to be deflected at a ninety-degree angle from its southward path. The balloon might be reasonably trapped in something like an event horizon and circling at a radius of perhaps ten miles from this boundary and at a speed which would likely be risky for the materials which compose that balloon. Mapping software would show this as a tight circle around that point. My guess would be that it would be unlikely that it should escape this zone.

And then there's the North Pole. From what I understand this is restricted air space. But an unmanned balloon can't respond to threats from the FAA or any other entity. Someone would either blow it out of the sky or it would fly its course. In this particular case—and again considering wind phenomenon within a FE context—the prevailing wind currents probably would not allow this flight path since you'd have these curved wind paths at lower/higher lines of latitude at any given point. You'd always be cheated by tangential winds thwarting you from your intended flight path.

In short, I'm not convinced that an unpowered craft could disprove RE at either pole. An unmanned balloon released in Rio de Janeiro and sighted/recovered in Africa with accurate timing might then be compared/contrasted to a twin balloon released at the similar line of latitude in the northern hemisphere. The flight times and calculated distances should be the same for both. In the FE context, we would see that the southern hemisphere version is five or six times the expected distance and the theory could be proved in this way.

[Iceman]

There arent restrictions on north pole airspace, nor antarctic. Launching a weather balloon anywhere requires a permit, the same way most countries require licensing for drone pilots.

Published maps of antarctic balloon paths show circular paths, typically creating paths around the pole during their lascent. My argument is that once any balloon gets high enough, a camera pointed down at earth's surface would provide evidence as to the shape of the continent - whether it 'looks' like it does in map projections for a round earth, as displayed in journal publications, and satellite imagery from numerous agencies, or whether it is a long, curving ice wall, as depicted in various FE maps.

Easypeasy, valuable information either way

[Bikini Polaris]

If FEs could manage a common Weather Balloon project, and they could agree on a protocol that denies any possible data tampering from space agencies, I believe that the first object to be studied would be the Sun. Since  Zetetic measurements say the Sun is just 3000 miles above us, my impression is that it's not required a great height for witnessing it just circling above the FE, without any perceived/illusory sunrise and sunset. Equinox days would be perfect for such measurements.