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Bill wrote

> I did play with departure
> and destination latitudes approaching zero and those seem to be a wee bit
> off at first blush.

My error.  "...latitudes approaching zero..."  should read "longitudes
approaching zero."

Lu wrote:

> 2.  Any great circle course, when plotted on a Mercator chart, looks a
> curve swinging towards the nearest pole and then back down again.  The
> rate of change of a course is greatest in the higher latitudes.  If I
> were trying to translate a great circle course into steering directions,
> I'd want to calculate course direction more frequently near this
> northward (or southward) peak than at lower latitudes.

In George's defense, he did note that the one could subdivide a long
passage.  He stated, "Having the coordinates of that middle-point, you can
then easily split each half further, and so on, using the same method, until
your point-to point legs are short enough to treat each one as a
rhumb-line."

Given a programmable calculator or computer, or more time the other
formula's are fine.  With nothing more than the simple formula George
presented and a $10 pocket calculator one can do the job on the fly.

Bill


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