Traditional Direction

Here is something that should have a name. It is about our perception of direction on a global scale. When we express the compass direction to a place what we mean is the direction that we would go to get there, and this sounds like it makes perfect sense.

There is something that has changed in recent decades, and our thinking about direction has not caught up. The change is in transportation. It used to be that we would travel by land and sea but now there is air transport. The way air transport has changed the direction is because of the polar regions. When it came to traveling the polar regions used to be inaccessible but now planes fly over the poles, but our directional thinking is still about land and sea transport.

Suppose that a mosque is being built in Los Angeles and the direction to Mecca must be determined. The traditional direction to Mecca, if based on land and sea transport, would look like this. Both images from Google Earth.

But if we were looking for the shortest distance to Mecca, regardless of whether it included the polar region, the direction would look like this.

Even if the destination isn't far enough away that the polar regions are a factor, the curvature of the earth changes the direction from what is indicated by a flat map. The earth is a globe and a map, while easier to use than a globe, is an imperfect representation of it. Again, what we mean by direction is the shortest distance between two points. Due to the curvature of the earth the shortest distance is shifted northward in the northern hemisphere and southward in the southern hemisphere. 

The following two images, from Google Earth, show the most direct line between New York and London. The line is shifted considerably northward from what it would be according to the compass directions on a flat map. It doesn't involve the polar region because the two places are not far enough apart, relative to the circumference of the earth. This is because the latitudinal circumference of the earth decreases as we get further from the equator.

Why don't we refer to the direction of travel to a distant place, before air travel, as the "Traditional Direction".