CathInfo.com

A question that occurs to me: are you looking only at commercial flights?

If so, a commercial airline has to have enough passengers to make the flight profitable. Are there enough people that travel from Johannesburg to Sao Paolo, for example, to make a direct flight viable? Or do they need to fly to a major hub, such as London, in order to have enough passengers to make it pay?
For example: all the commercial flights from my local airport fly to a metro hub. There's a larger town that I drive to semi-regularly about 150 miles away. If I wanted to fly there via commercial airline , I would have to fly to the metro hub (~250 miles), then change planes to fly 160 miles to get to that town. It's simply the economic factors that determine that.

Now if a person hired a charter to fly from Johannesburg to Sao Paulo, and was taken via London, that would be very compelling.

If what you hypothesize about unfilled flights were true, wouldn't the airlines be more likely to stop off at another major city in either South America or South Africe?

It seems odd that they would waste fuel (as Lad points out) by going so very far North to either London or Dubai (at least on a globe map.)

On a flat earth map, it makes perfect sense.

BTW, it takes a big hit to one's ego to break away from the MC progarmming and be considered an "oddball" for seeing the falsity of globe earth and going back to the simple Biblical explanation

If what you hypothesize about unfilled flights were true, wouldn't the airlines be more likely to stop off at another major city in either South America or South Africe?

It seems odd that they would waste fuel (as Lad points out) by going so very far North to either London or Dubai (at least on a globe map.)

On a flat earth map, it makes perfect sense.

BTW, it takes a big hit to one's ego to break away from the MC progarmming and be considered an "oddball" for seeing the falsity of globe earth and going back to the simple Biblical explanation

Yeah, I don't buy that those bizarre (on a globe) routes are driven by economics.  It would appear that JUST getting from there up to Europe is as long a distance as if you had just flown straight across over the Ocean.  So what would they be saving by flying to Europe first?  And there appears to be enough demand where they could mostly fill a flight non-stop across the Ocean.

Just eyeballing it from this link here, the flight up to Europe from South Africa is longer than what the direct flight across the Ocean would be.
https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-cpt-to-eze

So let's say it's because they can only fill half a plane.  Why would you fly a half-filled plane up for a stop in Europe that's farther away than if you had just gone direct with the same half-filled plane all the way across the Ocean?  You'd have to have a scenario where you could maybe fill the plane to Europe with 10% people who wanted to go to South America, and 90% with people who wanted to go to Europe.  But then in Europe you could combine them with more people who want to go to South America  But I just can't buy that you could only fill a tiny proportion of people on a plane from South Africa to South America.  Sure, maybe if someone just wanted to go to Buenos Aires.  But if you combined all the people that wanted to go to South America even if once there they had to connect to a different city, it would certainly make economic sense for there to be a fair number of flights down there that just went directly across the Ocean.  I could see it where some go up to Europe.  But who the heck would want to get on a plane for over 30 hours for what should be closer to an 8-10 hour direct flight?

Judging by the distances, it really should be like a 6-7 hour flight across the Ocean (it appears similar to travelling from the East Coast US to Europe.  Searching across all African designations to all in South America, I could only find one that shows it taking a weird dip route South toward Antarctica and making it list as a 14-hour trip, so double what I think it should be.

If you try Cape Town to Brazil on that flight link ... you can find dozens of regular flights, nearly all through Europe and some even through the Middle East.

Here is the only one I could find that allegedly flies directly across the Ocean.

from LAD to GRU

So I go to click on that to book a flight for one adults, and it shows a ticket price of $4,000.

Who the heck is going to spend $4,000 on that ticket?

FEs have found an occasional flight that claims to violate FE model, and have booked them, and every single time they've gotten cancelled.

If I saw a fare for $4,000 when I could book one through Europe for $1,000, guess which one I'm going to book.

Although that one MIGHT be doable? ... if you look more at a "polar projection" type of map: