Okay, so I knew both planes and ships use nautical miles, and that nautical miles are longer than statute miles, but I didn’t understand where this measurement came from. And why would something on the water and something in the sky use the same unit of measurement? They’re not even in the same space! WHAT THE HECK.

Again, probably something I should remember from school. Did you all know this one?

So, IT TURNS OUT, nautical miles are a measurement between latitude. You know, latitude – the imaginary lines running horizontally east to west around the globe that we use for measurement. The ones that start at 0° at the equator and go up to 90° at the North Pole and down to 90° at the South Pole.

APPARENTLY, each degree of latitude is broken into 60 “minutes.” And each “minute” is roughly 6,076’ which is… BOOM!!!… the measurement of a nautical mile. Sixty nautical miles equals one degree of latitude, or 1/90th of the distance from the equator to the pole.

So THAT’S why ships and aircraft use it – because it’s directly derived from the dimension of the earth (and not some man-made measurement like miles or kilometers).

TMYK!