{"id":5764,"date":"2015-05-18T08:58:11","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T12:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kasperskydaily.com\/uk\/?p=5764"},"modified":"2019-11-22T10:14:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T10:14:12","slug":"how-aircraft-routing-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.uk\/blog\/how-aircraft-routing-works\/5764\/","title":{"rendered":"Highways in the sky: how aircraft routing works"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once you look at planes\u00a0moving on a map using a tracking service like Flightradar24<\/a>,\u00a0you get a feeling that it\u2019s sheer Brownian motion<\/a>. It may look like an abundance of aircraft moving to and fro up in the air and it\u2019s just due to some unexplained miracle they don\u2019t clash. Of course, in reality, it\u2019s never the case: the highest level of safety, so characteristic of aviation as such, is clearly observed.<\/p>\n

For the start, let\u2019s acknowledge the fact that planes do not fly as wished, they keep to air tracks all the time. You might visualize this concept by recalling glowing airborne buoys which served to mark crossroads in Back to the Future Part II. In this respect, however, the reality is not very different from science fiction. \u00a0The key difference however is that they aren\u2019t buoy\u2019s and instead more similar to a\u00a0virtual spot on the map.<\/p>\n

Any route from one airport to another is going through these air tracks; an airplane does not fly in a direct line, it moves from one spot to another<\/div>\n

Certain geo-positioning coordinates get their own names: as a rule, it\u2019s a five-character combination of Latin vowels and consonants which can rather easily be read aloud and memorized (for instance, OKUDI, PESOT or LISNA). The letters itself do not bear much sense, apart from the cases when this combination reminds of a certain location nearby.<\/p>\n

Any route from one airport to another is going through these air tracks; an aeroplane\u00a0does not fly in a direct line, it moves from one spot to another. On larger distances, this polyline-shaped route almost fits the direct line. The reason is simple: the shorter the distance, the less fuel is consumed.<\/p>\n

Many people think the plane flies in the curvy line for some reason. At least on Flightradar the route is depicted as a curve, as well as on the on-board displays. There is no secret here, though: Earth is a sphere whereas maps and monitors are flat. The closer the route is to a pole, the more this route-depicting line is distorted.<\/p>\n

For instance, a route from Moscow to Los Angeles looks like a parabola on a map. But once you take a globe model and stretch a string between the two cities, it will become obvious that the plane\u2019s real-life route is in fact very close to this line, which is obviously the shortest distance.<\/p>\n