4 ms·
Oh, that is only 4,759,624 fathoms. Got it.
by egberts1 4y ago
Oh, that is only 4,759,624 fathoms. Got it.
- gumby 4y agoA nautical mile is one minute (60th of a degree) of latitude, in other words defined with the same technique as the meter originally was.
- papercrane 4y agoThese days it's just exactly 1852 meters. Since the Earth is not perfectly spherical the historical definition is ambiguous and until relatively recently the distance was different depending on jurisdictions.
- interestica 4y agoSo this plane can run for 4700 minutes? ...
- dotancohen 4y agoSo long as you understand "minute" to be a measure of distance, not time. Interestingly, "minute" as a unit of distance derives from it's usage as the small (or minutus) division of the day (the larger one being the hour). The hour (and thus the minute) were defined by how far the stars traveled overhead, their speed thought to be constant for any given celestial latitude. So dividing that speed by distance does bring us back to a unit of time, as expected. But the Earth is divided in 360 degrees yet the day by 24 hours, so 1 minute of latitude (at the Equator) is not the distance that a star travels in 1 minute of time. Let's see... 360/24 = 90/6 = 15... 4700/15 >~ 4500/15 = 300. So the A321XLR can travel just a bit further than the distance that a star over the equator would pass over the surface of the Earth in just over 300 minutes or just a bit over 5 hours. And just as an interesting aside, you can now understand why the word for the second smaller division of the hour is called what it is.
- MaxikCZ 4y agoand then some