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The carbon cost of a flight isn't a linear function of its distance, though — takeoff is much more expensive than cruise, and on long flights there's the cost o
by wiml 4y ago
The carbon cost of a flight isn't a linear function of its distance, though — takeoff is much more expensive than cruise, and on long flights there's the cost of hauling the fuel itself, rocket-equation style. (Presumably the data underlying this website accounts for all that.)
- seabass-labrax 4y agoIndeed; furthermore, some air traffic control regions have adopted a direct routing strategy, replacing the conventional routing strategy of published airways. This means that a flight from, say, Prague to Bucharest should be ever so slightly more efficient than the equivalent distance from London to Venice because of the direct routing.
- jameshart 4y agoAll of which complexity just means that air travel carbon costs are a slightly more complex noneuclidean metric than just ‘spherical geometry’. But you should still be able to define a metric over the graph of airports which is based on costs. And what Fermat points tell us is that even in well behaved metric spaces like the plane there can be cases where minimizing distance means going to a node other than one of the starting point. So in more complex spaces it seems likely that that remains the case. Which was all the op was asking.