Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2020 January 28

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January 28

Direct flights between antipodes

Musing in bed last night, as one does, I got to wondering whether there are pairs of places, with international airports, that are so positioned on the Earth's surface that there would be virtually no difference (in distance, time, and cost) whether one flew in one direction or the opposite direction to get from one to the other.

This question supposes there are direct flights between such places. If so, are flights always in the one direction, and why would this be so?

I guess such places would be antipodes, but not all would qualify if (a) there aren't direct flights to the other place, and (b) they don't have an international airport to begin with. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:47, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

https://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/ is a fun site for such musings. Best I could do with a quick search is Málaga, Spain and Auckland, NZ. About 70 km off. HiLo48 (talk) 23:59, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The thing is, most of the Earth's surface is water, and most of the Earth's land is in the Northern Hemisphere, so it's actually uncommon to have sizable settlements that are antipodal. This goes against our anthropocentric bias, where a lot of people seem to assume humans are about evenly distributed all over the planet's surface. --47.146.63.87 (talk) 00:04, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

There are cities that are exactly antipodal and are large enough to have airports: one pair I know about is Neiva and Palembang. (Their airports are just a few kilometers off being antipodal.) But I can't imagine that there are any antipodal pairs with direct air services from one to the other. If there were, the direction of travel would be chosen for commercial reasons such as:

• Prevailing winds
• Distance to airports for emergency diversions
• Possible intermediate stops for passengers

The first two are commercially significant because they affect how much fuel must be carried, and carrying more fuel requires burning more fuel (or taking fewer passengers). --142.112.159.101 (talk) 02:24, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• Longest flights is a relevant article for what has actually been done. Some long flights might actually be useful, others look to have been done to break a record, or for a one-off situation. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:00, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
• Sam Denby recently made a video about this. The most antipodal airports are Tangier Airport in Morocco and Whangarei Airport in New Zealand, but Whangarei is too small to take an international jet (some airliner-capable Colombian airports are nearly antipodal to Indonesian airports too). But there's no antipodal airline route, because planes just... can't do it. If there were planes capable of doing it, he reckons that London-Auckland is one plausible combination (Auckland-Madrid would be even closer, but demand is too low), and Sao Paulo-Shanghai is another. That said, prevailing winds, overflight fees, ETOPS rules, problems with flying over warzones, deserts, Antarctica etc mean that there's probably never going to be an antipodal route where both directions are equally feasible. Smurrayinchester 09:36, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
  • Not between antipodes, but I have found a route which can be flown either east or west: New York to Beijing. It flies near the North Pole either way, but it can either take a route over Greenland and Siberia to the east, or over Nuvanut and the Russian Far East to the west. UA89 took the Greenland route yesterday, which took 13 hours and 16 minutes, and the day before it took the Nuvanut route, which took 13 hours 12 minutes. (Note that if you plot these on a globe, they actually look virtually identical, with just a few miles deviation around the North Pole - they aren't really very different routes, they just look different when plotted on a flat map) Smurrayinchester 09:59, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, User:Smurrayinchester. That's exactly the sort of answer I love. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:48, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

That's a most interesting video. But I wish he spoke just a tad more slowly, and as for anti-//podes// - really??!! -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:02, 30 January 2020 (UTC)