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Great-circle navigation or orthodromic navigation (related to orthodromic course; from Ancient Greek ορθός (orthós) 'right angle' and δρόμος (drómos) 'path') is the practice of navigating a vessel (a ship or aircraft) along a great circle. Such routes yield the shortest distance between two points on the globe. [1]
A diagram illustrating great-circle distance (drawn in red) between two points on a sphere, P and Q. Two antipodal points, u and v are also shown. The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path ...
The haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes.Important in navigation, it is a special case of a more general formula in spherical trigonometry, the law of haversines, that relates the sides and angles of spherical triangles.
The disk bounded by a great circle is called a great disk: it is the intersection of a ball and a plane passing through its center. In higher dimensions, the great circles on the n-sphere are the intersection of the n-sphere with 2-planes that pass through the origin in the Euclidean space R n + 1. Half of a great circle may be called a great ...
They are based on the assumption that the figure of the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and hence are more accurate than methods that assume a spherical Earth, such as great-circle distance. The first (direct) method computes the location of a point that is a given distance and azimuth (direction) from another point. The second (inverse) method ...
A more extreme case is the air route between New York City and Hong Kong, for which the rhumb line path is 18,000 km (9,700 nmi). The great circle route over the North Pole is 13,000 km (7,000 nmi), or 5 + 1 ⁄ 2 hours less flying time at a typical cruising speed.
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By this device a great circle can be mapped exactly to a geodesic on an ellipsoid of revolution. There are also several ways of approximating geodesics on a terrestrial ellipsoid (with small flattening) (Rapp 1991, §6); some of these are described in the article on geographical distance.