Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there.
I was just here admiring this… domestic American flight from Denver to Charlotte.
Look how… mostly direct it is.
And really, that’s the beauty of planes; planes are great because you don’t have
to follow any convoluted roads—you just fill your plane up with plane juice, point
it at North Carolina, and kick back with a 3 hour 10 minute nap.
That’s not actually how it works, but flight routes pretty much look like that in most
parts of the world…
except for China.
When flying over China, flight routes look more like this, or this, or this.
They’ve got all sorts of random twists and turns, even though they’re just flying through
the open sky.
So, what gives?
Well, this is an interesting question, but in order to explain why China’s flight routes
look so weird, you need to understand how flight routes work in general.
Remember that thing I said earlier about how planes are great because they don’t have
to follow any convoluted roads?
Well, I hope that didn’t convince you to pause the video and spend three to nine months
getting a pilot's license, because that was a lie.
Planes do have to follow roads; they’re just invisible.
In fact, there have been invisible roads in the sky for nearly a hundred years now.
At first, there was just one: the transcontinental airway, which directed mail planes from New
York to San Francisco using concrete arrows on the ground.
And that was great, unless you wanted to fly in bad weather, over the water, or to anywhere
for any other reason besides delivering a letter to some guy in San Francisco.
So, our modern system of invisible sky roads—or, let’s just call them “airways” because
we’re not Civil War era ghosts who are confused and frightened by modern technology—that
airway system works pretty differently.
Basically, when a plane submits its planned route to air traffic control, that route will
be defined by a series of waypoints that they’re going to pass through or near during the flight.
There are thousands of these waypoints all over the globe, and they each have their own
five-letter names—sometimes even fun five-letter names, like UTOOB and EBAYE in the Bay Area,
TULIP outside the Netherlands, WIKID PAHTI in New England, and INBRD right over the border
of Alabama… which obviously just means “inboard.”
It’s inboard.
I don’t know why I thought INBRD near Alabama was funny.
It’s not.
It just means inboard.
Okay, moving on.
Now, these waypoints are usually strung together in long, criss-crossing airways, but planes
don’t always have to follow those exact routes; most of the time, they use waypoints
at the beginning and end of the flight to change direction, speed, or altitude, and
then spend the rest of the flight taking the shortest possible route to their destination.
That’s why long-haul flights across the US and Europe tend to look more like this
and less like this, and ticket prices look more like this and less like this.
But here’s where things get a little complicated: the sky belongs to the government.
Every government owns some chunk of the sky—all of the sky within 12 nautical miles of their
coast stretching all the way up to… actually, no one knows.
Most proposals are somewhere between 30 and 160 kilometers above sea level, but there
isn’t actually a real legal boundary for where the sky ends and space begins, so—since
I’m feeling petty—let’s just say it’s 351,221 feet—exactly one foot higher than
Jeff Bezos flew in his suggestively-shaped divorce escape pod.
Now, while most governments have agreed to open up their skies for commercial use in
exchange for a little bit of that in-flight WiFi money, there are still places they don’t
want anyone flying.
Now, in most countries, so little of the sky is restricted that this hardly affects civilian
flight routes.
Over the US, for example, only about 10% of the airspace is off-limits at any given time—places
like Washington DC, Manhattan, Camp David, anywhere within 5 nautical miles of an ongoing
WrestleMania, most major sporting events, certain military sites, and, interestingly,
Disney World, because Disney successfully lobbied to turn a temporary post-9/11 precaution
into a permanent no-fly zone over their mouse-themed swamp.
For the most part, it’s pretty easy to avoid these places without adding too much time
to your route.
But sometimes, these types of restrictions can take a nice, sensible straight line and
turn it into a zig-zaggy nightmare.
Doha to Khartoum, for example, is usually an easy three and a half hour flight.
But when Saudi Arabia declared “oh no you don’t” and stopped allowing Qatari aircraft
from going through their airspace in 2017, the length of that flight nearly doubled.
Just last year, Afghanistan did effectively the same thing to… everyone else in the
entire world, turning Afghani airspace into a giant wall that every flight in the region
needs to reroute around.
And don’t even get me started on how stupid flight routes looked like during the Cold
War.
For the most part, though, these sorts of really convoluted routes are just the result
of international conflicts.
No one would do this to themselves…
right?
“Wrong,” says China.
You see, China’s flight routes look so weird because of restrictions they’ve imposed
on themselves.
They still have the same sorts of waypoints and airways that the rest of the world has,
but it’s almost impossible to make a direct beeline for your destination.
And that’s because only about 20 to 30% of China’s airspace is set aside for civilian
aviation, and the other 70 to 80% is reserved for the Chinese military to, I don’t know,
practice their skywriting skills?
This means that commercial flights—even domestic commercial flights—have to stick
to fairly tight corridors to stay inside approved airspace, and can’t just take whatever route
is most convenient.
Now, not to go all “ooh China bad” on you, but at least in this case… yeah, China
bad.
Not only does this mean that flights over China are usually longer than they have to
be, cramming all of the planes into small airways means that delays and cancellations
are much more common, too.
Even before the pandemic made delays the hot new trend, about a third of Chinese flights
were delayed every day—and in Shanghai, that number was closer to half.
Fortunately, it seems like China is working on opening up more civilian airspace, so if
you’re watching this video in the future from your on-time beeline Chinese flight,
well… sorry for wasting your expensive WiFi.
So, as many of you have by now noticed, Half as Interesting is really, secretly just a
long-con to see how much I can make Storyblocks regret offering an unlimited stock footage
plan.
They responded by… sponsoring us?
It’s really kinda an alpha move and honestly has me pretty confused but, whatever.
It’s an easy enough ad to do because Storyblocks is pretty obviously an awesome deal.
Most stock footage sites charge hundreds of dollars per clip; Storyblocks charges far
less than that for an unlimited subscription.
Also, their footage catalog is actually really good and large—quite literally since the
day I started making videos it’s been the first place I’ve gone to look for a clip
I need and, usually, I find it.
Also, it’s not just stock footage—they have after effects and premiere pro templates,
music, images, sound effects, pretty much everything you need to make anything creative.
Storyblocks is a crucial part of our toolkit so, if you do any online creation, it should
really be part of yours.
Click the button on-screen or head over to storyblocks.com/hai to sign up, and you’ll
be helping support HAI while you’re at it.