The Soviet Union’s Flawed Rival to Concorde

Re:The Soviet Union’s Flawed Rival to Concorde by Turing_Machine on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @11:45AM (#15500099)

Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in one hop.

ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most all air cargo between China and the mainland U.S. passes through Anchorage. The Anchorage FedEx hub is only passed by Hong Kong and Memphis in terms of volume, and the UPS hub is also one of the largest for that company.

That's counterintuitive when you look at a flat map, but not on a globe.

Here's a flat projection of some great circle routes:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN

Note that the shortest path goes a lot closer to Alaska than it does Hawaii.

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Re:The Soviet Union’s Flawed Rival to Concorde by digi_owl on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @11:59AM (#15500251)

Reminds me of something the boss of the company operating a former soviet cargo plane demonstrated. They often figured out how to get the plane somewhere by taking a piece of string cut to fit the flight range of the plane, and placing it on top of a globs to look for suitable airports.

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Re:The Soviet Union’s Flawed Rival to Concorde by kobeya on Thursday October 19, 2017 @07:53AM (#15507093)

Depends on the destination. Try Sydney, for example.

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