Name: Why Planes Don't Fly Over the Pacific Ocean
Uploaded: 2019-10-15T10:44:33.000Z
Duration: 9 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

You know, making all these videos is pretty exhausting work.

Adverbs of manner

Somewhere far away, preferably exotic, and must be exciting! Korea?

Great food, fantastic culture, plenty of ways to embarrass myself by misunderstanding the

But I noticed something strange while booking my Asian getaway.

My plane seems to be making a detour over Alaska…

Why is my airline going out of its way to avoid the Pacific Ocean?

Did I accidentally sign up for the caribou route?

At first you might think it was a safety issue.

The Pacific is the largest and deepest of the world's oceans.

If a plane encounters a problem over a seemingly endless and bottomless pond of water, the

pilots are going to have a rough time finding a safe spot to set her down.

Alaska might not be overpopulated with international airports, but it's a lot better than the

“Alaska, at least it's better than sinking!”

Guessing that it was a safety precaution wouldn't be entirely wrong.

When planning a route, many pilots prefer to maximize the number of airports along their

Emergencies are incredibly rare relative to how many planes take to the skies every day.

But I can't think of many things more stressful than losing an engine 30,000 feet over the

That said, it isn't the main reason airlines tend to avoid making a straight shot east

Ultimately, it comes down to saving fuel and time.

It's easy to forget that an airline is a business.

A business whose profits depends on how quickly and cheaply it can move passengers between

People also prefer to get to their next stop as quickly as possible, so it's a win-win

Long story short, which is not my forte, speed is usually the primary factor in determining

Excluding special circumstances such as passing through the jet streams or other meteorological

concerns, the fastest croute is almost always the one closest to a straight line.

But wait, just look at that flight path – it's anything BUT a straight line!

Well, yeah, when you look at it on a flat map.

It can be confusing since we're used to looking at our world on a two-dimensional

Unless you bust out a globe each time you need to check where some city or country is

located, you probably look at a world map.

So, on a 2D map, making a giant rainbow to avoid the Pacific Ocean looks like a much

But since the Earth is a sphere (eh, more or less, but more on that later), a straight

line is going to look very different in three-dimensional spaces.

Oh yeah, I just said most of us use Google maps...

I'll put one end of a string on Los Angeles and the other end on Tokyo.

When I pull it taught, you'll notice that the string isn't running exactly parallel

to the lines of latitude printed on the globe.

Instead, it'll bend slightly upwards as it follows the curvature of this mini Earth

This effect is even more pronounced in practice because my globe isn't a perfect recreation

In fact, the problem is that it's too perfect!

You see, unlike a globe, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.

Our planet is slightly bigger around the middle, kinda like me after the holidays!

When looking at pictures taken from outer space, the difference isn't enough to notice.

The planet is so big that it's easy to lose track of a few hundred miles here and there.

But check it out: if you could take a giant string and measure the Earth's circumference

through the poles, you'd need 24,860 miles of string.

But if you do the same thing at the equator, it'd jump up to 24,900 miles.

It's because our planet rotates on its axis.

Ever spin yourself really fast on the playground merry-go-round when you were a kid?

Remember feeling like the thing was going to throw you out to the sides?

Anyway, Something similar happens to the Earth's midsection as it spins – the force causes

Yes, it's spinning fast enough to do that!

Anybody tuning in from the equator right now, you're currently moving about 1,000 mph!

That 40-mile difference in the Earth's width might not seem like very much.

But when it comes to the surface area of an entire planet, that little bit of added girth

The combination of these two factors, the curvature of the Earth and its extra equatorial

width, ooh I like that, mean that curving toward the poles is a shorter distance than

flying (what seems like on a map) “straight” across!

None of this is to say that planes never cross the Pacific Ocean.

I'm not so much into giant insects and spiders but, hey, to each his own!

Anyway, planes will also venture over open water to avoid storms.

While aircraft can outclimb some types of severe weather such as hurricanes and tropical

storms, seemingly mundane thunderstorms are surprisingly challenging!

With clouds reaching altitudes of over 60,000 feet, airplanes are advised to steer around

It's almost unheard of for modern aircraft to be brought down by severe weather, but

bad enough turbulence can cause injuries to passengers and crew as they (and all the stuff

they've packed with them!) get tossed around the cabin.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why Planes Don't Fly Over the Pacific Ocean

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