It's a flat world after all. <-Disney, but SCARY!

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The forum software couldn't confirm it was a youtube.

Weird. I had never had that problem before. I get copyright crap that forces you to go to Youtube to watch something. I post Youtube stuff here all the time too.

First time for me too, here. But it's happened on other forums in the past.

[Brian37]

Weird. I had never had that problem before. I get copyright crap that forces you to go to Youtube to watch something. I post Youtube stuff here all the time too.

First time for me too, here. But it's happened on other forums in the past.

It has to be space aliens, or Obama. You know everything is Obama's fault.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

First time for me too, here. But it's happened on other forums in the past.

It has to be space aliens, or Obama. You know everything is Obama's fault.

Yeah, it was enabled in one of those bills he signed in 2017.

[Rev. Rye]

Surprisingly, I can’t find much info on whether the survey in the OP asked about the shape of the Earth. Then again, given that the most compelling evidence for a flat Earth hinges on assuming that Qantas and South African Airways are just creating decoy flights that don’t actually exist from Santiago to Sydney and Johannesburg to Perth just to build this George Kaplan proof of a round Earth, this might not be much of a concern.





And, surprisingly, as devastating as his debunking of this argument is, Hbomb doesn’t go into the real reason transoceanic flights across the Southern Hemisphere are so rare: ETOPS. You see, most commercial planes have two engines, and if one fails, they need to be close to a diversionary airport where repairs can be made. Until the eighties, the rule was you had to be within an hour of another airport. Advances in airplane design have since advanced the time to (usually) 2-3 hours. It wasn’t until 2009 that ETOPS times of over 4 hours were even possible. The current top ETOPS is 330 minutes. This isn’t much of a problem for the Northern Hemisphere, but the Southern Hemisphere is different for reasons that should be obvious if you look at a map:



As you can see, the Southern Hemisphere is a lot different land-wise. I concede that this, like all 2-dimensional maps, distorts the actual scale, but even taking that into account, the Southern contains half as much land as the Northern, closer to a third if, like the map above, you remove Antarctica, which, for ETOPS purposes, is functionally the same as the open ocean due to having very little in the way of human life, let alone diversionary airports. And those flights I mentioned only started fairly recently, due to ETOPS only recently Reaching the point where it’s possible.