See Why Planes Don’t Fly Over the Pacific Ocean

Ever noticed plane routes at the airport for planes traveling from, say, Japan to San Francisco? Generally, most flight routes going from America to Asia seem to have an odd pattern. It appears there's something about the Pacific Ocean they seem to avoid. Thinking about it, you may not bother yourself about the odd pattern. After all, it seems safer to avoid flying over the world's deepest and largest ocean right?

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Summary :

Let’s look at some other factors, the first of which is something called jet streams. The earth's atmosphere is truly an interesting object of study. For this, we have to go back to some high school geography.
circumvent the Pacific ocean is to shorten flight time and increase their profit margins. Those routes that go around the Pacific are faster than the straight routes that connect the two continents. By shortening flight time, airlines also use less fuel. In the end, it all counts for more economic flights and ultimately more money.

But in fact there is a condition to this. This rule only holds on a flat surface. And so on a 2-dimensional map, the fastest route between two points would indeed be a straight line. But on a curved surface, like the Earth's surface, that is the case.

For curved surfaces, curved paths are actually faster than straight line paths. Yeah, it could be a bit difficult to wrap your head around this. So the best way to explain this to you would be to use an experiment.
Now don't forget this is a straight chord on a three dimensional map. When this three dimensional map is converted to a two dimensional map, this line will look just like what you see on those maps where the airline routes appear to deviate from the Pacific ocean.

On the actual globe of the earth, these curved airline routes are actually more pronounced than what you see in the earth's globe model. This is primarily because of the shape of the Earth. Unlike what you see on the globe model, the Earth is actually not shaped in a perfect globe. Rather it is what geographers call a geoid shape. This shape has the earth bulging out on its sides.

To really get a good grasp of this, imagine taking the earth's circumference through its North and south poles. Using these coordinates, the Earth's circumference will measure exactly 40,008 kilometers. Now, if you take the circumference of earth through the equator at the center of the earth, a different measurement is obtained.

You will find that the Earth's circumference measures 40,072 kilometers along this axis. So clearly the Earth 'bulges' out at its middle. And as you'll expect, there is a clear scientific explanation for this. And this comes from the rotation of the Earth.
Consider this question. If you were to take a trip along the Earth's circumference and you wanted to save time and use less fuel, which of these circumferential paths would you choose for your navigation? - the one that takes you across the north and south poles or the one that travels along the equator?
Certainly, you will go for the trip that takes you through the north and south poles. And that my friends, is exactly what airlines do when they circumnavigate around the Pacific ocean. Onboard.
In the end the planning of aircraft travel paths involves a combination of factors, one of which is safety, as you would expect. But when it comes to those weird, curved flight paths, it's all about reducing flight speed and cutting down fuel costs.
But here's another side to it that you might not be seeing. It's easy to blame airlines for taking the easy way out by cutting costs and making more money. In reality that's not exactly the case.
Of course, you cannot begrudge the world's largest airlines for cutting travel times and maximising profits, that is exactly what businesses do. More importantly this approach does something vital for our environment.
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