"bent like a dog's hind leg," 1703. Originally of a type of staircase.   A quick flight planning exercise for the IV-P. I selected two worst case over water flights at FL200 around L Superior(DLH to YXZ) and L Michigan(OBK PMN). It only seems to add 5-7 minutes to the flight to avoid the "outside glide range" area. Just from a time efficiency standpoint(planning, gear, training, etc), this seems like a faster strategy.   Same applies to ice or CBs. The plane is so fast, why not go around it and enjoy the scenery in VMC for an extra 10 minutes, instead of white knuckles? A divert to the right can also pick up a tailwind around the Low, and you can beat your counterpart who went thru the middle of it!   If you have a flight planner that lets you do "rubber band" diverts around "dark stuff", it is always impressive how little distance the dogleg adds. That triangle distance looks a lot bigger than the straight line, but it really isn't, as a fraction of the total trip.