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Great-circle navigation. Great-circle navigation or orthodromic navigation (related to orthodromic course; from Ancient Greek ορθός (orthós) 'right angle' and δρόμος (drómos) 'path') is the practice of navigating a vessel (a ship or aircraft) along a great circle. Such routes yield the shortest distance between two points on the globe.
The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path between the two points on the surface of the sphere. (By comparison, the shortest path passing through the sphere's interior is the chord between ...
After a 5 hour layover, the flight continued east-bound on a slightly longer route back to Paris-Le Bourget flying 19,246 kilometres (11,959 mi; 10,392 nmi), covering a great circle distance of 18,541 kilometres (11,521 mi; 10,011 nmi) [143] in 21 hours and 46 minutes. This was the first non-stop flight between Europe and New Zealand.
The southernmost flight route with plausible airports would be between Buenos Aires and Perth. [40] With a 175° (S) heading, the route's great circle exceeds 85° S and would be within 500 kilometres (310 mi) of the South Pole. Currently, no commercial airline operates this 12,600-kilometre (7,800 mi; 6,800 nmi) route.
The disk bounded by a great circle is called a great disk: it is the intersection of a ball and a plane passing through its center. In higher dimensions, the great circles on the n-sphere are the intersection of the n-sphere with 2-planes that pass through the origin in the Euclidean space R n + 1. Half of a great circle may be called a great ...
Flight length. In aviation, the flight length or flight distance refers to the distance of a flight. Aircraft do not necessarily follow the great-circle distance, but may opt for a longer route due to weather, traffic, to utilise a jet stream, or to refuel. Commercial flights are often categorized into long-, medium- or short-haul by commercial ...
The great circle route over the North Pole is 13,000 km (7,000 nmi), or 5 + 1 ⁄ 2 hours less flying time at a typical cruising speed. Some old maps in the Mercator projection have grids composed of lines of latitude and longitude but also show rhumb lines which are oriented directly towards north, at a right angle from the north, or at some ...
The route, devised by the Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer in 1611, reduced the time of a voyage between The Netherlands and Java, in the Dutch East Indies, from almost 12 months to about six months, compared to the previous Arab and Portuguese monsoon route. The clipper route ran from west to east through the Southern Ocean, making use of the ...