These quotes and excerpts about not being able to fly directly around the southern hemisphere of the Earth will run chills down your spine and make your jaw drop, thinking "Holy cow! The flat earthers may be right after all! There really is something to this!"
First, look what Wikipedia has to say about the Polar flight routes around Antarctica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_route
Next, look at this question posted on Yahoo Answers. Someone found out using PlaneFinder.net that you can't track flights using global GPS or radar that are going around the southern hemisphere, only the northern hemisphere. How convenient!Antarctica
Few airlines fly between cities having a great circle route over Antarctica. Direct flights between South Africa and New Zealand would overfly Antarctica, but no airline has scheduled such flights.
https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/i ... 837AAyrrvr
Someone else noticed the same thing:Why does GPS fail to track airplane flights travelling across the southern hemisphere?
If you go on one of these flight tracking web sites and watch a flight that goes from South America to South Africa doe example: it will show the plane on the map as it departs, but it disappears as it's meant to be flying over the ocean; and only reappears when it gets on land near the destination.
Funnily, one answer he received, which may be the truth, was:I can see them tracked just fine over oceans in the northern hemisphere. Apparently radar magically works better above the equator.
Source(s):
planefinder.net
Next, on the Airliners.net forum, someone noticed that during a flight along the southern hemisphere, his plane had to go up north to stop and refuel:Because the earth is flat and they cant have you knowing it is.
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forum ... in/907589/
It seems there are very few direct flights along the southern hemisphere:I once flew Aerolineas AKL-EZE-AKL. On the return flight, the trusty old B742 couldn't hold enough gas to make the trip non-stop, so we stopped in Rio Galagos to refuel (I understand this is normal practice). RG is right down the bottom of Argentina toward the tip of South American, so an arc drawn from here to AKL is lower than what is shown on the map above (which shows the route AKL->EZE). I flew back mid winter of about 1996 or 1997 and we definitely flew over icebergs, but not pack ice. Presumably the map shown above shows the outline of land with the white representing the permanent ice shelf? So in the winter time, the line of pack ice would be much further north (????)
By the way, probably the most interesting part about that trip was that although we cleared immigration on departing EZE, we were allowed outside the terminal building at Rio Galegos during the hour or so that the aircraft was being refueled. Myself and another pax caught a taxi and went for a trip into town to check things out. Mind you, it is that desolate and isolated, I guess there's nowhere you can go!
So you see, even the unbiased posters at Airliners.net forum have noticed this, that there are very few flights around the southern hemisphere. And when you try to take one, it will usually take you UP NORTH first, like to Dubai, before taking you back down south again! Such a flight route would ONLY make sense on a flat earth map! Holy cow! Holy shit!I thought we were talking about real flights here.
There is no Auckland - Capetown service nor is there a Perth or Sydney (non-stop) to Buenos Aires flight.
As far as ETOPS is concerned, I think range limitations would rule out the use of a twin-engined aircraft even before ETOPS became a consideration. Smile
By now you guys must be thinking, "OMG! There really is something to this flat earth claim after all!"