Why Don't Planes Fly in a Straight Line?

Why do planes fly such weird, curvy routes? Take New York to Tokyo: it goes over Alaska. Not a detour — the plane is flying straight. It's the map that's bent. Then three more things bend the real route: wind (a jet stream once pushed a 747 from New York to London in 4 hours 56 minutes), rules (twin-engine jets must stay within a set time of an emergency runway — the ETOPS rule), and borders (closed airspace turned Helsinki–Tokyo from 9 hours into 13). And one night in 2001, those rules saved 306 people on a jet that glided 120 km with no engines. Every number in this video appears on screen with its source. Sound effects by Kenney (CC0). #Aviation #Maps #ETOPS