Changing basis and acceleration. Attach orthonormal unit vectors to the rotating frame, with a common origin fixed in the inertial frame. An infinitesimal rotation changes a vector fixed in those axes by : its tip moves tangentially to the circle about the rotation axis. More generally, write . Differentiating the components and the rotating basis separately proves the rotating-frame derivative formula,
Figure 1.
Original geometric construction of the tangential change of a vector during a small positive rotation; the change is dtheta crossed with A
. Details.
Apply the formula first to position: , where . Apply it again to both terms. For constant ,
One cross term comes from differentiating in the inertial frame and another from differentiating in . The displayed source formula implicitly requires constant angular velocity and an unaccelerated common origin. For changing rotation rate there is also ; an accelerating origin supplies its own translational acceleration. Moving the rotation terms to the force side gives the apparent Coriolis force and centrifugal force with negative signs.
Southward motion on Earth. Use local east, north and up axes, with latitude positive northward. Then and . The Coriolis acceleration in local Earth coordinates gives
It is westward in the northern hemisphere, eastward in the southern hemisphere and zero for exactly southward motion at the equator. There is no vertical Coriolis component for this particular velocity.
Correct steering. On the desired meridional track, drag has no eastward component because it is antiparallel to the velocity. If the thrust makes signed angle east of south, its eastward component is . The cross-track force balance is therefore
so
The argument must have magnitude at most one for this simple thrust-only correction to be feasible. The signed angle changes sign at the equator: correction is east of south in the north and west of south in the south. Thus the phrase “east of south” cannot describe a positive correction throughout the entire flight.
Wrong-sign correction and the miss distance. A literally constant velocity vector cannot develop a cross-track displacement. The physically useful interpretation of the last task is constant speed, with an erroneous lateral steering correction. In the usual leading-track model, thrust and drag balance along the actual motion, and the applied transverse correction has the correct magnitude but the wrong sign. It therefore reinforces rather than cancels the Coriolis force. Starting at the equator, use the unperturbed southward track , and let be the eastward departure from that track. To first order in the departure,
There is a factor two relative to uncompensated Coriolis deflection because the wrong correction adds an equal lateral force. Integration gives the wrong-sign Coriolis steering error,
For southern angular distance , and , the nominal flight time after the equator is
Taking gives
The small-latitude approximation gives and , or , confirming the scale and direction.
This is an estimate under an explicit steering model, not an exact trajectory forced by the wording. For example, retaining spherical transport of the local axes while still linearizing in the cross-track motion gives, with , . Consequently and the longitude departure is . The distance along the destination parallel is then . Corrections from the changed track and a more detailed control law are not fixed by the problem. If “keeps the velocity constant” instead means the full vector, the pilot would need an additional compensating force and there would be no miss; if thrust is kept at a specified geographical bearing despite drift, its along-track component and lateral drag must also be modelled.