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Monday, September 25, 2017

Flat Earth Claim: Flight from Bali diverted to Alaska proves the Flat Earth?

Flat Earth Claim



Globe Earth Reality


In true Flat Earth-style they "researched" this thoroughly (right?).  So I guess that means they are lying?  Or maybe they just can't research, you be the judge...

That flight went from Bali to Taiwan, and THEN to Los Angeles -- it did NOT cross the Pacific from Bali going to LA as claimed.

"Gr8Believer", in true Flat Earther fashion, refuses to accept this and doubles down:


So I dug around a bit and found the actual flight data from Flight Aware on flight CAL8 from 2015 Oct 7th:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CAL8/history/20151007/1550Z/RCTP/KLAX


Once you look at the Taiwan -> LAX flight path (ON A GLOBE) and take into account the distances, flight speeds, arrival times, etc -- you can see this matches the Globe model and it makes perfect sense.  There really isn't another good option - they flew about 400-500 miles out of the way total and had to refuel with a total delay time of a little over 3 hours.

There is absolutely zero evidence this flight was Bali to LAX, there are no China Air flights from Bali to LAX, the flight goes Bali to Taiwan to LAX, at best he latched on to some slightly vague statements in the press articles.

The Mercator projection used for most "flattened maps" (google maps, flight aware, many others use this projection-style) makes the Great Circle "direct path on a sphere" look like a big arc -- but that's because the map is a distortion of the Globe (it has to be, Gauss's Theorema Egregium is (indirectly) a mathematical proof that there is no way to flatten a sphere into a flat map without distortions and tears).  Tighten a string over an actual Globe and it will match the flight path I show below.

I put all the data into a nice (?) graphic, for ease of refuting in certain online discussions. Here I include the Globe Great Circle path (red) and the yellow line is approximately the diversion path so I could estimate the distance, and thus the travel time.


and the saved tweet in case it is deleted:


1 comment:

  1. They really should study flight patterns then jumping to conclusions such as this.

    ReplyDelete

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