I opened this issue for i hope one of the Chinian pilots see or heard this issue and tries the way that passing from Shangai.
This is a working shows some cities on China and Australia. As we see that the shortest route passing from Shangai when going from Beijing to Melbourne.
But pilots usually driving a way going from Hong Kong that's not requered. So they are usually flying 250 kms more like this pilot.
https://tr.flightaware.com/live/flight/CCA165/history/20160507/1705Z/ZBAA/YMML
Intikam you seem to be obsessed with flights and flight times and flight distances ...
We have already explained to you why the return trip can be longer or shorter in terms of time taken - because of jet streams !!
Now having done quite a bit of international travel myself I can say that there are a multitude of reasons that the initial flight path may be changed (which may impact the flight time) ... some common ones are
1. to avoid severe air turbulence (if you have ever flown through really bad turbulence you realise why they have a sick bag for each passenger)
2. to avoid other air traffic (especially through busy flight path areas - this is probably why Melbourne to Beijing does not fly over Shanghai because there would be so much air traffic in the skies near Shanghai)
3. to avoid storms (flying through an electrical storm when gaining altitude or coming down is scary plus!! I flew from Las Vegas to Oklahoma City in a tiny plane through a terrible storm and totally freaked out until we landed safely)
4. to avoid volcanic ash (totally stuffs up a planes engines)
5. to take advantage of prevailing winds (especially good tail winds)
There are probably many other reasons.
I have been on flights where we have had to circle for over an hour because of congestion at the airport. I was on a plane once which was just about to touch down in Dallas and suddenly the pilot pulled up and we took off again because the runway where we were landing had not been cleared of another plane which had landed just in front of us (very scary!!!) We circled for what seemed like forever as we then had to wait for 3 other planes which were already literally queued up to land while we completed a great big circle.
Once many many years ago on a Melbourne to Sydney flight we detoured over Wagga Wagga because of electrical storms near Canberra (and Melbourne to Sydney is such a short trip - 500km - that planes don't even reach normal cruising altitudes)
Also to fly an extra 250 km takes an extra 15-17 minutes - on a 10 or 11 hour flight this is irrelevant - spend some time at an airport and you will see arriving 15 minutes earlier or 15 minutes later than expected is common and no big deal! This can be due to good tail winds or having to slightly divert for turbulence or whatever. The last time I came back from Bali we arrived 10 minutes early ... on a 5 hour flight...just got great tail winds :-) Unfortunately it then took us about 2 hours to get through customs ...such is life lol
Hope this helps :-)
But none of this proves any flat earth model anyway !! No more than the fact that yesterday my daughter and I both left a friend's house (about 10 km away) at the same time but she beat me home by about 5 minutes - she had a good run with the traffic lights, I didn't, and we went slightly different ways and I got detoured because of roadworks ... planes are subject to the same thing, traffic, weather, detours for one reason or another ... that's flying...!!