Questions from the Cockpit: A Christmas quandary

Nancy, a student pilot in Florida, writes: Over airport pancakes and discussion of holiday plans, Ol’ Saint Nick’s airport came up, and my friends and I began to banter about the location of the North Pole Airport and what its GPS location would be. I thought it should be 0° north latitude, by 0° longitude…but then I realized that I don’t know if zero longitude is west or east. To top off all that confusion, Google says the North Pole is at 90° north, 135° west! What gives?

I have it on good authority that Santa is still using an old airmail-style flashing beacon system up there for IFR approaches and does not yet have a GPS approach. He’s a bit of a traditionalist, that way, you know.

Well, that’s what I had always heard, anyway.

But now I do see that my Jeppesen e-binder includes a North Pole Village RNAV (GPS) approach, so I guess I’m as out of date on those facts as my instrument currency is.

But I can still be of help on good old lat/long questions!

Let’s start with latitude, as lines of latitude are listed first in coordinates by convention, both figuratively and literally.

Latitude has been around since the ancient mariners — apparently starting with the Phoenicians — while longitude had to wait until the mid-1700s to be worked out as an effective tool, so lat came first, and therefore should be listed first by tradition, a.k.a. by “by convention.”

Additionally, and more recently, that traditional convention became a real convention, in the form of an International Standard (ISO 6709) that states that latitude comes before longitude when listing coordinates.

Anyway, per your question, 0° latitude is actually down at the equator, not up at the pole. The latitudes, those lines that wrap around the globe from middle up to the top and down to the bottom, count up — or down — from the equator and terminate at the geographic poles. At either pole they are measured as 90°. So Google is correct on that half of the question.

Why are there only 90°?

It’s one of those fun problems you get when you try to map roughly spherical objects as a flat map, using lines that wrap all the way around the globe. If you map the earth as a flat circle, once you define the equator as zero, then designate if you are north or south of the equator by simply saying you are either north or south, then you only have a quarter of a circle — or 90° — left to play with because the lines on the left side of the circle are the same as the lines on the right side.

Check out this drawing:

Now, unlike all the other lines of latitude, 90° north and south are not actually lines at all, but points. So Santa’s complex and Sleigh Port is at 90° north latitude.

FYI, in the old days, the lines of latitude were also called parallels, as the lines are, well, parallel to the equator, and to each other (while lines of longitude are bent), and in older books you’ll find the North Pole called the “90th Parallel North.”

That, of course, assumes that Santa and his elves are at the geographic North Pole, not the magnetic North Pole. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Meanwhile, the longitude of the North Pole is a bit more of an interesting problem, as cartography problems go. At the North Pole, all lines of longitude converge…so the location is, well, ALL lines of longitude.

Personally, I would have voted for the Prime Meridian. That would have placed the Santaport at 90° north, 0° east. Yeah, the Prime Meridian, which is neither east nor west, seems most often recorded as east, but I couldn’t find out why. But of course, that’s the same as saying 90° north, 180° west, come to think of it. I think you can see the problem. As all lines of longitude converge at the pole, you can take your pick. Any line will be correct. You can use your house’s longitude, if you like.

Why did Google choose 135 West? I’ve got no idea. It’s not Google’s headquarters or anything like that. In fact, there’s not one interesting thing along that line of longitude as far as I can see (my apologies to those of you in remote extreme western Canada for saying your digs aren’t interesting). But, hey, most of that line is open ocean.

As a side note, like with longitude, there is no time zone for the North Pole or, if you prefer to think of it a different way, all time zones are in effect at the North Pole!

Speaking of time, that’s probably all the time we need to spend on this subject. So paraphrasing Santa: Merry Christmas to all and to all a good flight.