And everything under his flight path.
Well, anyway, we all know he (and Iron Man) travels at PlotSpeed.
I do this quite often in Google Earth. I pick a place and try to see how easy I can find it with no labels to clue me in.
Geez O Pete, guys, what you’re describing isn’t that much different than what I used to do in ultralights. Flying from point A to point B with a map and compass ain’t a superpower, it’s well within the grasp of ordinary mortals. Ditto for navigating by landmarks, or the stars.
I own a nifty handheld aviation transceiver that let’s me use radio navigation aids AND talk to other flying humanoids! That’s a neat toy, too.
If taking along a GPS, using your cell phone for navigation, or otherwise strapping technology on yourself (including maps) be sure that stuff is tethered to you securely. The FAA will hold you responsible for anything you drop that causes injury or damage. Also, dropping stuff from altitude is a pain because you lose the thing. Ask this former open-cockpit pilot how she knows that… Yep, voice of experience.
Fly like Superman? The first couple times follow the freeways, you don’t have to fly high, in fact, above the ground-based obstacles and below where the airplanes usually are would do just fine.
I, too, recommend goggles.
New York to Phoenix? No problem at all. If you can fly, then you can fly 10 feet off the ground to read the highway signs, if you need to.
Now New York to, say, South Africa might be more difficult because most of it is over open sea. But if you loose your bearings, you can always start flying in a grid pattern, expanding it until you run into some landmark, somewhere.
In the OP’s hypothetical, you only have the ability to fly, and no other super powers. I think this accounts for the need for goggles.
(And a jacket, now that I think about it. It gets cold up there!)
Also, would you ever get tired? Does it take effort to fly across the country? Lacking super stamina, are you pretty much SOL except for going across town?
I did some very basic celestial navigation once. It might be tougher than you think. You have to be able to see the horizon, know your height above sea level, and have access to a nautical almanac.
It would have made a better visual if he would have dropped out of his private jet through bomb bay doors, instead of flying around the world in his suit.
Would he have to carry a sextant in his utility belt?
Yes, that too.
Following the highway system isn’t easy if you can’t see the signs, and the OP clearly states you have none of Superman’s powers except safe flight. If you’re going so low and slow that you CAN see the signs, why the hell not just drive?
When I was in Army intelligence one of the things we had to learn was interpreting aerial photography. It is shockingly hard; the most mundane of things can be indecipherable when seen from above. Once, my entire intermediate int course was stumped and unable to identify… a billboard. Unless you are very experienced with it, everything from above looks weird.
IF you’re going to fly like Superman, and he flies very high, like airliner high, when travelling from place to place, it’s not going to be at all easy to find a lot of things unless they’re next to very notably recognizable geographic things.
In the early 80s, a guy I knew who was a pilot and owned a Cessna took me and a few others from Pittsburgh’s County Airport to Hershey, PA. Early in our short flight he was looking down and asked if we thought the road below us was the PA Turnpike. I don’t know if he was f*cking with us or serious. (He’d earlier asked if anyone smelled something burning. I spoke up, alarmed, as I definitely did and was just about to mention it. He explained that he’d turned the heat on.)
I’m picturing Flying Guy poring over multiple ungainly maps with dividers, a protractor and a compass for an hour before he takes off.
Now, since it was stipulated that his ONLY power is flight, how fast can he fly?
And how high? Even in summer he’d have to be pretty well-bundled if he were flying even moderately high. Then, when he landed in Phoenix, he’d have to find someplace to stash his down jacket and goggles and other gear for the trip home.
“Dad, Dad, Dad! I just saw a flying man zooming through the clouds!”
“Like, in a superhero suit?”
“Naaah, kind of a puffy jacket and snow pants…”
This is easy to see when playing with Google Earth.
I also noticed it when on airline trips. I live less than 5 miles from my airport, and I always imagined how much fun it would be to see my neighborhood from up above. And for my few 10-20 flights I got a window seat for this specific purpose. But in actual fact, I could hardly recognize anything, even in the first or last 5-10 minutes, when I knew that we were over areas that I was intimately familiar with. If the plane was anywhere outside the actual airport fence, I might as well have been 5 states away.
To be fair, there were a few times that I could actually read the exit signs on a highway. But even then, my reaction was usually one of merely recognizing the name of the place on the sign, not of recognizing the actual exit itself. OTOH, I was merely a passenger and therefore unsure of which direction I was looking, and Superman would probably not have that particular problem.
Does airline info include tail numbers? You could just follow an airliner to your destination.
Fortunately, Superman has additional powers. If he’s flying from LA to NYC to save Jimmy, he can hear Jimmy yelling, which gives him directional and distance info. A person without super hearing, etc., would be more like Ralph from the Greatest American Hero
Do you mean from Gotham to Metropolis?
National City to Metropolis
If we assume that we’re not allowed to use external aid (like a compass, map, etc.) AND we’re not allowed to re-orient in the air, then I’d say that a normal person would probably start pretty poorly and eventually become fairly good, the more they did it and the more that they specifically focused on growing the capability.
I don’t see any reason that this would be any different from learning the streets of your city or how to walk through a forest. Once you know an area well-enough, and you’re used to thinking in terms of straight lines, you should be able to angle towards your target and get pretty close to accurate.
For longer distances - like going from LA to New York - it’s probably not possible to simply angle just perfectly and do it in a single run. But, if you made a habit of doing that trip frequently, I would expect that you quickly develop a few landing regions that you learn and come to know well, along the way, and you can bounce from one to the next fairly simply. And as you keep doing it, that you’d get to a point where you could start bypassing some of them and following an even straighter line.
How far apart those regions would be would probably depend on how far you can see from your comfortable flying height. If we only have Superman’s flying ability but nothing else then it might not be much more than you could see at the top of a large hill - since it starts to get cold as you go up higher. We might also expect that our person could prefer to fly in something more like an L shape to keep in warm weather as long as possible before veering North, in to the colder climates. Similarly, they might zig-zag a bit to avoid mountains and snowy regions. They might prefer to land in particular spots with restaurants they like and clean restrooms.
A straight shot for a raw human, floating in the sky with no walls and no toilet, just might not be the highest priority.
Crossing oceans, on the other hand, that one could be a stumper. If we’re flying slow enough, I could easily see people getting into loops and giant curves to nowhere.