Airplane routes: what you wanted to know

Why are the routes of the aircraft not built in a straight line? Why fly back always faster and where can you see a flying airplane online? This article will tell you about this.

Follow the flight

If you are interested in seeing how airplanes fly, flight routes and not only, you can look at services like Flightradar. It is fascinating to follow online for the movement of all airliners of the world - data on servers is updated every half a minute. In addition to monitoring the figure of the aircraft, you can find out a set of information about it:

• Bornomer and affiliation to the airline;
• a photo;
• Current speed and altitude;
• Paragraph A and point B;
• Distance traveled from the airport and much more.

Neither presidential boards, nor military aircraft on these services will not be reflected - only the routes of passenger aircraft.

Trajectory: straight or curved?

On which trajectory are the aircraft moving? Those who saw the online routes of aircraft, and often flying people, it seems that the plane is flying in an arc, which is quite strange - is it really "not enough of the sky"? However, once again looking at the flight line, you will notice that the arc tends towards the pole with the upper part. The plane moves quite logically directly, but with the projection of the round Earth onto a flat screen, a curve appears instead of a straight line. The fidelity of this theory can be confirmed with the help of a student's globe and a thread stretched between two cities.

But the airplane routes are not a continuous straight line. The air route is a set of straight lines between control points, which, although aligned to make the flight distance minimal, still do not draw it perfectly smooth. For such points, both radio beacons and certain geographic coordinates are adopted. Their names consist of memorable five-letter combinations.

It is also important that for the twin-engine aircraft (and there are more and more of them) the route should be built in such a way that in case of failure of one engine, the board could "reach" to the nearest airport. Consequently, its route will be laid so that, to some extent, circumambulate the poles, deserts and oceans.

But what about the fact that one way flight is always shorter than the other? Passengers try, in their own way, to explain the phenomenon, up to the fact that the rotation of the planet influences it. The reason is here in the winds. At the same height as the airplane routes, air masses move in their advantage from west to east. Therefore, with a favorable wind speed of the aircraft increases, and when the wind "in the nose" slows down.

Routes at the airport

The reason why a plane sits at the airport on this strip, rather than on another, is also the wind. As with takeoff, and when landing, it must be counter, in extreme cases, lateral. With the passing - the speed of the aircraft increases, and he may simply not have enough runway length. Therefore, each of them has its own labeled number.

There are also a number of restrictions on aircraft routes in the airport area: a ban on flights directly over the city or over a special facility - a regime institution or elite housing, the inhabitants of which are nervous about the constant noise of engines over the house.