The situation described in the video would not result in a plane flying “upside down” because Earth does not have a top or bottom. The force of gravity pulls everything on the planet toward the center, regardless of how the planet is aligned from a viewer’s perspective in space. Instead, it's based on keeping a consistent altitude and direction. “It would have to make that kind of flight path on a globe, which is such an absurdity,” the narrator says.īut this line of thinking is nonsense. Straight-and-level flight doesn't refer to a literal straight line through the air.
The narrator describes a hypothetical flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seoul, South Korea, claiming such a trip would require a plane to fly “so far around the Earth that it’s flying downwards, with its nose vertically downwards" and “around the curve of the Earth so that the airplane is now flying upside down.” The same claim appeared in an Instagram post that accumulated more than 3,000 likes before it was deleted. “Airplanes will fly for hours at the same altitude, never dipping their nose down to follow the curve of the Earth,” says the narrator of a video in the Oct. One of the first things aspiring pilots learn is straight-and-level flight, a technique that involves maintaining control of a plane while staying at the same altitude and flying in one direction.Ī recent Facebook post, though, claims straight-and-level flight supports the long-debunked theory that the Earth is flat. Watch Video: NOAA plane travels through the eye of Hurricane Ian The claim: Planes flying ‘straight and level’ prove the Earth is flat
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