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Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic.

Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them? https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t...

edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!

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Quite simply - there is much more land mass in the Northern Hemisphere, and flights, say from Moscow to Anchorage or Reykjavik to Toronto have great circle routes that traverse the Arctic circle.

The Southern Hemisphere on the other hand, has no large land masses near it, and even the southern most points of Australia/New Zealand and South America are too far away for any great circle routes to cut through there without being a greater distance than any other routing.

Something like PER–SCL or AKL–CPT would fly over Antarctica in strict great circle terms, but would require ETOPS-370 rules to fly. Also, I have no idea how prevailing winds would affect the optimal routing. And it's not like these are highly trafficked city pairs.

I seem to remember that Qantas has had flights crossing Antarctica in the past; their point was probably to cross/sightsee Antarctica rather than be the optimal routing for a flight though.

Just as an aside, no-one planning actual ETOPS routes would ever use IATA airport codes.

IATA codes are to ICAO as NetBIOS names are to DNS.

I wish we could stamp-out the casual use of IATA codes, they do have some internal admin uses within airlines but they only cover a subset of airports and they don't have any logical decoding sequence.

Yes, but we passengers use them regularly.

It also has to do with a lack of options, if technical difficulties are encountered. The threshold for error and malfunction is much, much more extreme.

While planes fly over mountain ranges, Antarctica is similarly dangerous, but without good reasons to attempt overflight.

Don't feed the troll :-/

wow, what? now you're a troll if you don't know why runways are not normally distributed on planet earth?

I mean, the simple explanation is a) that there are flights that cross part of Antarctica, and b) that there isn't much there. The Southern Hemisphere is pretty empty.

There's Sydney-Santiago, but apparently that doesn't always cross Antarctica depending on winds.

It would only make sense to fly over the antarctic if you were traveling from one Southern hemisphere city to another. But most of the developed world is in the Northern hemisphere.

ETOPS and jet streams

Flying Joburg to Sydney once we went pretty far south and skimmed Antartica, could see ice outside the windows

you can see it in this video:

https://youtu.be/i_a4WGxu62c?t=669

It depends on jet streams and if you're in a twin-engine or four-engine jet

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