How do flat earthers explain the difference in local time during flights across the globe?

1. How flat‑earth supporters frame the puzzle and a strikingly simple model

Flat‑earth sources commonly describe the Sun as a localized light that moves above a flat disc, illuminating a limited region at any moment; time differences arise from where that spotlight is located, not from planetary rotation, and time zones are dismissed as a conventional globalist overlay rather than a physical consequence ^{[1] [2]}. This zetetic or circling‑Sun picture is meant to reproduce sunrise and sunset locally: as the Sun sweeps above the disc, locations enter and leave illumination and thus experience different solar times. Proponents point to irregular political time‑zone borders as evidence that timekeeping is arbitrary rather than geophysical. The flat‑earth descriptions emphasize worldview consistency over quantitative prediction, and they typically omit a working, testable mapping from Sun position to observed clock offsets on real flight paths ^[1].

2. What objective flight data actually test and why they matter

Researchers comparing scheduled international airline flight times to map‑derived distances treat flight durations as a proxy for the true geometric separation between cities; on a globe, the shortest path is a great circle and flight times closely track great‑circle distances, while flat‑earth straight‑line distances from standard flat maps produce systematic distortions that do not match observed trip durations ^{[3] [4]}. The Creation.com study and related analyses explicitly measured reported flight times against both models and found the spherical model explains travel time patterns far better than flat‑map distances, demonstrating that the flat map would require extreme, implausible distortions or conspiratorial reporting of times to reconcile with reality. The mismatch is not minor: it is structural — entire regions appear closer or farther under flat projections in ways that run counter to airline operations and schedules ^{[3] [4]}.

3. Typical flat‑earth counterarguments and why they falter under scrutiny

When confronted with flight‑time discrepancies, flat‑earth proponents offer two main responses: that travelers or airlines systematically misreport times as part of a vast conspiracy, or that winds, air traffic routing, and currents sufficiently alter durations to hide the underlying flat geometry. Both responses are problematic: a universal, coordinated misreporting explanation requires an implausibly large conspiracy, and attributing the pattern to meteorological variation demands implausible, finely tuned environmental effects consistently aligned to fake globe geometry ^[5]. Aviation data include seasonally averaged routes, recorded distances, and frequent reproducible flight corridors; these operational datasets are incompatible with ad hoc wind‑and‑routing corrections being the primary explanation for the decades‑long, globally consistent agreement with spherical geometry ^{[5] [3]}.

4. The practical mechanics that make time changes predictable on a globe

On a spherical Earth, local solar time changes predictably with longitude because the planet’s rotation brings longitudes under the Sun at regular angular rates; time zones are a human system built on that predictable relationship, refined by political borders for convenience, but their broad east‑west progression reflects the underlying rotation ^{[4] [3]}. Aircraft follow optimized routes that approximate great circles for fuel and time efficiency; flight durations therefore encode the angular separations that determine time differences. The combination of predictable rotation, standardized time‑zone offsets tied to longitude, and repeatable aviation routing produces the systematic local‑time shifts observed on international flights, a causal chain the flat‑earth spotlight model does not reproduce with comparable quantitative accuracy ^{[3] [4]}.

5. Bottom line: where explanations succeed and where questions remain

Flat‑earth explanations identify an intuitive mechanism — a localized Sun or human time conventions — but they lack rigorous, testable mappings from that mechanism to measurable phenomena like flight schedules and route geometry; empirical aviation data favor the spherical Earth model decisively, and the flat‑earth replies rely on conspiratorial or ad hoc fixes that are unsupported by operational records ^{[1] [3] [5]}. Critics note that proponents sometimes point to political oddities in time‑zone lines, which are real but trivial compared with the globe’s predictive power; the unresolved issue for the flat‑earth view is providing a quantitative model that matches worldwide flight times and repeated observations without invoking global deception ^{[2] [4]}.