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Great Circle Mapper - cool site
Excerpts from Patrick Smith's "Ask the Pilot" column - =========================== My new favorite Web site is the Great Circle Mapper (http://gc.kls2.com). I've yet to find a source that more adroitly illustrates the shortcomings and fallacies of the average wall map or atlas. Never again will I sigh and stammer when presented with the question, "Why does my flight from Chicago to Hong Kong fly over Siberia?" Go to the Paths box and type in ORD-HKG. Hit the Display button, and behold. In fact, freeze right there, gazing down upon the Arctic (note also the more correctly rendered Greenland, as compared to the monsterized version presented by Mercator et al.). Without touching another key, locate California and France. Notice the shortest path between San Francisco and Paris takes you above the southern tip of Greenland. Return to the Paths box and enter SFO-CDG to see the actual tracing. This may help avoid incidents like the one a year ago when a group of Paris-bound passengers, watching their route unfold on the bulkhead progress screen, were induced to near panic in belief their flight had been hijacked. It took an announcement from the captain to explain why the aircraft seemed headed for the North Pole instead of Charles de Gaulle airport. Other goodies are available on the site. One of the most intriguing is the Locations feature that automatically determines the most distant earthly airport from a chosen point. If I feed my hometown BOS into the Locations box (followed by a double click on the resulting data), I'm informed that Margaret River, Western Australia, is the farthest airport I can possibly fly to. Once you're feeling comfortable, or addiction is setting in, have a look at SVO-SCL. Presently there's no direct service from Moscow to Santiago, Chile, but notice the way this imaginary flight traces two great circles, mirrored arcs on either side of the equator evinced through a delicate figure-S. Yes, the bottom of the world is no less round than the top. Try typing GIG-SYD (Rio de Janeiro-Sydney) to view one of the more dramatic southerly crossings. Note the passage over Antarctica on a trip from South America to Australia. http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/...askthepilot126 |
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The people fear of being hijacked because they have been terrorized by
the information they received. Remember, you can't terrorize dead people, only live ones. Terror networks like C.N.N., B.B.C., and so on do a lot of terrorizing,. And of course, you can only terrorize or manipulate people who are educated. That certainly illustrate one of the many points of the dangers of education. |
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