Those who like to search the internet for explanations for the madness of our modern world in the West, and to find out who might be responsible for them, will sooner or later come across someone who promotes the idea that the Earth is flat. James Delingpole has. He likes to have ‘special guests’ on his podcast who from time to time stretch the boundaries of belief and perception. I’m definitely a Delingpole fan. I very much appreciate each of his podcasts from “down the rabbit-hole”, even the ones that seem to visit the wilder shores of so-called conspiracy theory.
People frequently err in thinking that, because James has invited a particular person on the ‘Delingpod’, he necessarily believes everything his interlocuter says. Rather, he listens and asks questions, sometimes stumbling over them, with an air of credulity which he has to do in order to draw out the candid best from his guests. In so doing he leaves us to make up our own minds. Which is as it should be.
I have found his output to be invaluable in helping me to come to an understanding of reality, not only in the 21stCentury, but in vast swathes of our history that may not actually be as we have been led to believe, whether by lies of commission or lies of omission. However, I’m now a wee bit worried because James, in one of his latest outings, seems to have bought the Flat Earth Theory.
I’ve been asking myself why I’m even writing about this. What does it have to do with me? Among the educated peoples of the World, there is such a vanishingly small number who think the World is flat that it would seem that it is a pointless exercise. It has become accepted among those who regard themselves as ‘awake’ that we should question everything we are told and, to a very large degree, I agree with them. However, unless you are going to set about deconstructing the entire field of human knowledge, going back to the dawn of recorded history, on the basis that some bunch of control freaks having been lying to us forever about absolutely everything for their own evil purposes, some things have to be accepted as true. Gravity is one (try defying that), the Earth being a globe is another. The reason I’m writing about it is because this is the sort of stuff that brings conspiracy researchers in general into disrepute. It will have the opponents of The Truth sniggering behind your back if you even mention such an idea.
Nevertheless, there is a small sect among us mortals who sincerely believe that the World is flat. The origins of the belief seem to be in a literal acceptance of the creation story in Genesis which has been embellished over time with an array of arguments to ‘prove’ the truth of it. Now, I’m a Christian, albeit not a very good one, but I accept that the attempt to describe the beginning of everything which was written over 3,500 years ago, in a language I don’t understand, may need a bit of revision and re-evaluation. Nor do I think that Charles Darwin or Richard Dawkins are necessarily two of the ‘good guys’.
Those who hold to Flat Earth theory have the Flat Earth Society which has number of ‘disproofs’ of widely accepted facts such as ships disappearing over the horizon hull first, then superstructure and finally crow’s nest. The Society has a forum where the Flat-Earthers can get together and discuss all aspects of their belief. I’m not going to go there in the interests of not getting bogged down in minutiae. Anybody who wishes to can visit the site and look into what is claimed but I wish to stick to the big picture and use common sense and report factual observations.
Back to James Delingpole. He recently did a podcast with a fellow by the name of Steven Young which he writes about in this Substack. Because Young has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics he is taken to understand science which, I have to concede, is entirely reasonable. However, he has rejected as nonsense the field he used to work in and along the way has become sceptical about the world being a spinning globe because he can’t prove that it is. He thinks that while individual elements in flat earth theory may have flaws - the overall picture points very much away from the globe theory model.
Just as I’m not going to discuss the ideas of the Flat-Earthers in their fora, I’m not going to detail what James has written or what was said between him and Steven Young. You can go there and read it and listen to the podcast once it’s released from behind the paywall if you so desire. His basic premise is that the idea that the Earth is globular infringes what he calls ‘Delingpole’s Law’.
I can’t remember now whether it’s Delingpole’s First Law or Delingpole’s Second Law, but whichever it is it goes like this: The more often They tell us something, the less likely it is that it is actually true.
So, for example, we know that dinosaurs never existed because small children, boys especially, are taught about little else. Kids can’t even escape these made-up beasts when they go to bed because they’re printed all over their pyjamas, on the wall posters they got from the Natural History Museum and probably on their pillowcases too.
Still, I’m aware that Delingpole’s Law will not be nearly enough to persuade die-hard globetards. If the earth is flat, they’re going to need hard evidence - and a lot more of it than anyone has presented so far.
But I don’t think, to be honest, they’re ever going to get it. Personally I find the Flat Earth evidence I’ve looked at so far pretty persuasive - the ultra-long lens photos refuting the supposed curvature; the ‘flat non rotating earth assumption’ used in aircraft navigation; emergency landings in places inconsistent with the globe model; etc. If you’re expecting anything stronger than that, though, let me put to you a question. Suppose, for a moment, that the Flat Earthers are right and that there has been a massive elite conspiracy since the 16th century to conceal the true shape of our dwelling place, a conspiracy which includes all the scientists, all the seats of learning, all the schools and all the conduits (books, TV, movies, newspapers, the internet) which dispense information. Do you not think, maybe, that such a long-standing, far-reaching conspiracy would take scrupulous care to render it all but impossible for you to acquire the kind of proof you are demanding?
So, I’m a ‘die-hard globetard’. And he’s made himself a flattard. I was going to add a comment under the article but there were 438 the last time I looked, some of them quite detailed and vehement. This subject certainly gets folk steamed up. So, I decided to do this instead and what I’m going to do now is present the evidence to back up what the overwhelming majority of us believe to be true: The Earth is a globe.
I’m going to keep it simple, Occam’s Razor to the fore. The place I’m going to start is, to quote James, the ‘flat non-rotating assumption used in aircraft navigation’. This is where I have the advantage over James Delingpole and his guest Steven Young in that I was a professional pilot for 44 years, both in the military and in commercial airlines. Now, aircraft navigation is a very large topic and the first question I would ask is to which aspect of aircraft navigation is he referring. The chartage? The terrain database held within aircraft flight management systems? The on-board sensors? Does he mean long-range navigation or short range. I don’t know but my guess is he probably means the charts so let’s take a look.
The most widely used map projection for air navigation is the Lambert’s Conical Conformal. This type of projection renders the area of each individual chart produced as if it were flat. The compromise is that there is distortion. The only place the map is true is along the standard parallels (there are usually two). Between them the terrain depicted is contracted because the area between them is mapped below the Earth’s surface. The area outside them it is expanded because it is above the Earth’s surface.
Because of this, adjacent charts do not perfectly match and cannot be joined together. The beauty of the system is that a large area of land such as the continent of Africa can be mapped with each chart based on its own standard parallels as if the area of each chart were flat (see below). You’ll note that each numbered chart is slightly curved because it has been produced using the conical projection. Africa is charted using three different pairs of standard parallels for the projections. That way map distortion is kept within manageable bounds. Such charts are used for en-route navigation. Terminal charts for airport control zones and approach charts will have their own standard parallels
This system aids short-haul flying within a continent, especially in Europe where traffic is dense and airspace often restricted but when it comes to inter-continental and trans-oceanic flight the main thing to understand is that long-haul navigation is based on aircraft flying a Great Circle route. A Great Circle divides a sphere into two hemispheres, so the plane of the circle goes through the centre of the sphere. On Earth, the Equator is a Great Circle, but all other lines of latitude are not, and all meridians are Great Circles. A Great Circle is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of the Earth and it is followed on long-haul flights as much as possible for maximum efficiency in terms of time and fuel.
A long-haul flight leaving London bound for Los Angeles will set off from Britain on a North-West heading which will back through West somewhere over Greenland or Baffin Island and end up on a South-West heading as the aircraft approaches its destination. Were the Earth flat, flying a Great Circle would not be necessary.
Next, we come to the Sun, Moon and Stars. How is it that half of the Earth is in daylight at the same time as the other half is in darkness? How is it that the Arctic can be in continuous darkness for months on end, known as Polar Night, while at the same time the Antarctic is in continuous daylight? If the earth were flat, the whole of it would be in daylight at the same time, would it not? The Sun would rise for everyone at the same time and set for everyone at the same time. But we know that the actual times in UTC of sunset and sunrise vary with latitude and longitude. This is only explicable if the Earth is a rotating globe.
Polar Night, which is taken at the poles to last for 179 days, is shorter than Polar Day. There are gradations of polar twilight based on the Sun’s angular distance below the horizon that reduce the duration of the continuous night from 179 days at the pole to 24 hours just inside the Arctic or Antarctic Circle. Polar Day endures for 186 days. The explanation is the refraction of sunlight in the atmosphere.
Our closest celestial neighbour, the Moon, is an orb. But is it a flat disc? No, it isn’t. Why not? Because we have phases of the moon every 28 days where it goes from not being visible, through the crescent stages to gibbous then a full moon before waning back through gibbous to a crescent then darkness once more. Only an orbiting spherical object could do this. Furthermore, anyone who has witnessed a lunar eclipse, as I have more than once, will have seen the earth’s shadow cast a curve over the surface of the Moon. Furthermore, how would the Moon influence the tides if the earth were flat? The fact that there are two tidal cycles roughly every 24 hours tells us that the moon must be going around an object which has an opposite side – a globe Earth.
As far as the Stars are concerned, there a completely different set of constellations in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern. We know that constellations are lower in the sky in mid-winter by the same angle as the tilt of the Earth’s axis, roughly 23.5º. We know too that in the summer months, some constellations appear above the horizon that we do not see in the winter such as the Summer triangle asterism, Scorpio and Sagittarius.
Radio wave propagation is the next thing to consider. Again, keeping it simple, radio waves broadly propagate in one of three ways: The ground wave, the free space or air wave and the sky wave. There is a fourth wave, the tropospheric wave, which in certain conditions of air pressure and humidity, the radio refractive index of the air is altered leading to longer range free space transmission and reception than is normal.
Which wave radio signals exploit depends on the frequency used in the transmission. The overwhelming majority of air voice communication is in the VHF (civil) or UHF (military) bandwidths. That is broadly 118 to 380 megahertz (Mhz). In this bandwidth it is the air wave which is paramount, so VHF/UHF radio range depends on line of sight. Very close to a transmitting station (as on an airport) the ground wave will play a part but if there are buildings in the way there can still be radio blind spots.
In general, the maximum range of aviation radio voice communication depends on the height of both the transmitter and receiver. It is given by the following simple equation:
D = 1.23 (√H1 + √H2) where D is distance in nautical miles, H1 is the transmitter height and H2 is the receiver height.
As long as there are no obstacles in the way (e.g. mountain ranges) an aircraft at 35,000ft should be able to communicate with a ground station at sea level at 1.23*√35,000 nautical miles. H1 being 0, that is 230 miles. At 15,000 feet it would be 150 miles. For this reason, some aviation radio transmitters are sited high. For instance, years ago before data link was available, pilots relied on weather broadcasts. The Geneva weather broadcast could be heard over a large part of North-Western Europe because the transmitter is on the top of the Jura mountains, about 6,000 feet above sea level. To an aircraft at 35,000 feet the theoretical maximum reception distance North of the Alps would be 325 nautical miles.
The simple reason for the reduction in radio range at the lower altitudes is because there is no longer line-of-sight to the transmitter due to the curvature of the earth. Thus, airports which are geographically quite close are able to use the same frequency for control of the runways, taxiways and aprons because they are talking to aircraft at low altitude or on the ground.
Let me now recount what I have observed so far as it relates to this question. I have already described Great Circle tracks, so I’ll start with this: There were occasions when I took off at sunset and, heading West towards the setting Sun as the aircraft climbed, I observed the Sun rise above the horizon again. This is because as the aircraft climbs, an observer is looking beyond the original horizon seen at ground level, a horizon which curves away from the observer which is on a depressed sightline compared to the ground level horizon. How could that possibly happen if the Earth were not a globe? This is illustrated by the following pair of images of a Head Up Display (HUD).
In this first image, taken at about 100 feet above the runway in a Boeing 787 on final approach, you can see the horizon bar coincident with the real horizon. The circle with wings in the centre represents the aircraft velocity vector which shows where the aircraft is going and therefore where it will touch down.
In the second image, the Boeing 787 is level at 39,000 feet. You can see an aircraft index in the centre about 2.5º above the horizon line. This shows the aircraft attitude relative to the horizon and where it is pointing. The horizon line indicates level at the aircraft’s actual position. To the right is a circle with inverted gull wings which is the velocity vector showing where the aircraft is actually going. It is in level flight with drift to the right caused by the 80-knot tail and crosswind shown at top left by the → and 80. But, note where the real horizon is. It is about 3° below the HUD horizon line because of the curvature of the Earth and you can actually see a slight curvature of the real horizon in the photograph. The following rough sketch shows what happens.
Which leads me on to personal experience. I have spent many hours in airliner cockpits at 39,000 and on occasions I’ve been to 41,000 feet. In my Air Force days, I used to fly air tests on fighter jets after they’d had an engine change or been through deep servicing when they had been taken apart and put back together. Going to 40,000 feet was routine and I’ve taken them up to over 45,000 feet. At those altitudes the curvature of the Earth is visible. Sitting in an airliner cockpit, you can look to the left and scan rightwards from the side window through the two windscreens to the side window on the right and you can clearly see the horizon bend.
I believe in trusting the evidence of my own eyes but, just to be sure, I emailed a mate who had been a test pilot in the RAF and also a Concorde pilot. I knew that in both roles he would have flown far higher than I have, so I put the question to him: have you seen the curvature of the Earth? Not only did he answer in the affirmative, but he also provided the photograph below which was taken from the flight deck of a Concorde at 60,000 feet. Case closed, I think.
So, there you have it. The earth is not flat. Of course, this will not stop me subscribing to James Delingpole’s Substack; he has some fantastic podcast guests which produces interesting discussions and his podcasts about the Psalms draw me in too. However, with the climate hoax, geo-engineering, the covid scam, the Ukraine war and the destruction of Gaza, critical race theory, critical gender theory, trans abuse of vulnerable youngsters, Satanic ritual abuse, the UN and the WEF and their Sustainable Development Goals, uncontrolled and unwanted mass migration, censorship and surveillance, all of which are connected, and much more besides, there is a plethora of real, nefarious stuff going on which needs light shone on it. He could even do a deep dive into Christianity or, was Stephen Hawking really a genius? Now, that would be riveting. We really don’t need to be bothered by Flat Earth Theory.
https://iainhunter.substack.com/