What type of person (or what specific career) uses the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection map?

Question

What type of person (or what specific career) uses the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection map?

Answer 1

I think you'll find this type of map is used when navigating in polar regions. Polar stereographic charts are a specific type of this map.

Sort of person who'd use it? Polar trekkers, and old time air pilots ;-) before we had better systems.

Answer 2

Part of the azimuthal family and commonly used in the polar aspect, the azimuthal equidistant projection is invaluable for drawing some geodesics as straight lines.  It also shows distances in true scale over the Earth surface (the captain of a nuclear submarine could use this projection to check which cities lie inside its destructive range).    

This azimuthal equidistant map (see link) is centered around Campinas, Brazil.  This kind of map requires a fairly dense geographical database as its periphery is strongly stretched.  

Unfortunately, such properties are valid for the central point only, and each azimuthal equidistant map must be tailor-made for that specific location.

On the other hand, a gnomonic map does not preserve distances and can not show the whole Earth, but it does map all geodesics to straight lines.  In other words, there is no optimal single map which can show the shortest path between any two points on Earth.

As a rule, azimuthal projections make straightforward finding true directions from a single point: a radio operator whose hardware is stationed at the map's center could point its antenna for maximum gain towards anywhere on Earth.

Since the equidistant azimuthal preserves radial distances from the central point, here we immediately see that a shortest hypothetical flight from Campinas to Central Australia passes directly south over the pole.