On 4 September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly did something it had never done before: it took a formal position on how the world literally looks. By 164 votes to one, it backed the “Correct the Map” resolution — a call to move away from the 450-year-old Mercator projection and towards maps that show the continents at their true relative size.
It made headlines everywhere, and for good reason. But almost none of the coverage mentioned something every student pilot learns early on: Mercator was never meant to show size in the first place. It was built for navigation — and at that job, it’s still one of the most useful tools in the cockpit.
If you want to understand why a “wrong” map is still the right one for flying, you’re really asking a question straight out of ATPL General Navigation.
What the UN actually voted for
First, the news itself. The resolution, led by Togo on behalf of the African Union and co-sponsored by the Bahamas, urges governments, schools, media and tech companies to adopt the Equal Earth projection instead of Mercator as their default world map.
The motivation is that the Mercator projection badly distorts relative size. It inflates regions near the poles and compresses those near the equator. The most famous example: on a Mercator map, Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa. In reality, Africa is about 14 times larger — big enough to contain the mainland United States, China, India and most of Europe at once. Supporters framed the change as a matter of “cognitive justice”: how big a place looks on a map shapes how important it feels.
One thing worth being precise about, because it’s often reported loosely: the resolution is not legally binding. It doesn’t ban Mercator. It’s a recommendation to prefer equal-area maps for general use — a nudge, not a prohibition.
Why every flat map is “wrong”
Here’s the foundation the whole story rests on, and it’s the first thing you learn about projections in ground school: you cannot flatten a sphere without breaking something.
The Earth is (very nearly) a sphere. A map is flat. Getting from one to the other always forces a compromise, and a projection is simply a set of rules for which properties you keep and which you sacrifice. You can preserve area, or angles, or distance, or direction — but never all of them at once. There is no perfect map. There are only maps that are right for a specific purpose.
So the real question is never “which map is correct?” It’s “correct for what?”
What Mercator sacrifices — and what it protects
Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, published his projection in 1569. He wasn’t designing a poster for a classroom wall. He was solving a problem for sailors.
Mercator’s projection is a conformal projection: it preserves angles and the shapes of small areas. To do that, it stretches the map more and more as you move away from the equator — which is exactly why Greenland and Antarctica balloon out of all proportion. That size distortion is the price. And in exchange for paying it, Mercator delivers one property that is close to magical for a navigator:
On a Mercator chart, a straight line is a line of constant compass bearing.
That line has a name you’ll meet in General Navigation: a rhumb line, or loxodrome. It crosses every meridian at the same angle. If you draw a straight line from A to B on a Mercator chart, read the angle against a meridian, and simply fly that heading, you will arrive at B. For centuries of sailors — and later, aviators — that turned an impossibly complex navigation problem into something you could do with a ruler and a protractor.
That is not a bug being tolerated. It’s the entire reason the projection exists.
The plot twist: the straight line isn’t the shortest one
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, and where ATPL theory goes one layer deeper than the news story.
The rhumb line is easy to fly, but it is usually not the shortest route between two points. The shortest route on the surface of a sphere is called a great circle — and on a Mercator chart, a great circle appears as a curved line, not a straight one.
Over short distances the difference is tiny. But on a long-haul flight — say, crossing the Atlantic or heading over the pole to Tokyo — the great circle can be hundreds of miles shorter than the rhumb line. That’s why long routes look “curved” on the map you see on the seat-back screen: they’re actually flying the straightest possible path over a round Earth.
So a pilot works with both ideas at once: the great circle for efficiency, the rhumb line for simplicity, and a Mercator chart to make sense of both. Understanding how those relate — and how they look on different projections — is core General Navigation, and a reliable source of exam questions.
The real lesson, for pilots and everyone else
The UN’s vote is a genuinely good change for how the general public sees the world. For a poster, an atlas or a classroom, Equal Earth tells a fairer story about size, and Mercator arguably never should have been the default there in the first place.
But “better for showing size” and “better for navigation” are two completely different jobs, and no single map wins both. Equal Earth gets area right. Mercator gets bearings right. A pilot doesn’t argue about which is the “real” map — a pilot knows that a chart is a tool, and picks the right tool for the task in front of them.
That habit of mind — knowing what a tool is designed to do, what it quietly sacrifices to do it, and when to reach for a different one — might be the most useful thing the whole map debate can teach a future pilot. It’s also, not by coincidence, exactly what studying ATPL theory trains you to think like.
Projections, rhumb lines and great circles are all part of General Navigation — one of the 13 subjects in our 100% online EASA ATPL(A) course, taught by active airline pilots. Curious how the rest of the theory fits together? Start with our guide to how the EASA ATPL works.
