Transpacific Route Question
I’m a frequent, curious traveler with no affiliation to your industry. I hope it’s ok to ask this here.
I often fly between LAX and Southeast Asia, and enjoy watching the plane's route on my monitor. Yesterday as my wife and I were flying Eva BR15 LAX to TPE, we were studying the display closely. Today after landing we looked at a globe, and were puzzled that our route seem to fly several hundred miles north of what appears to be the shortest path. Doing web searches made things more puzzling.
The Flight Aware map of BR15’s route shows it passing just south of Kodiak Island and the Kamchatka Peninsula.
But when I stretch a piece of string between those cities on a globe, it looks like the shortest route is actually a few hundred miles south of there — well south of the Aleutian Islands, not north of them. When I entered LAX and TPE on the “Great Circle Mapper” site it showed a route similar to my string check.
Can someone explain why the actual flight path are so different from what seems to be the shortest route for this long flight? (Maybe the flight tracks are designed that way to maintain radar contact, or to allow emergency access to other airports en route? Maybe it has to do with the jet stream?)
In terms of flight time and fuel usage is the apparently longer route a benefit, a compromise, or does it not make much difference?
Thanks in advance.