system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What would be the real world consequences if Earths magnetic field 'flipped' 

Would all our electronic compasses fail and planes fall out the sky or would it be less hollywood than that?
gpt
Less hollywood, but compasses would indeed stop working as the currently do.

A reversal is - in all likelyhood - not a rapid swap from north to south. Our best understanding of it is that the dipole field which presently exists starts becoming a multipole field, with several different north and south poles developing (as, in fact, appears to already be happening). Those multipoles migrate, then re-coalesce to a dipole oriented at or near the opposite polarity of the previous stable orientation.

This will likely take decades to centuries. Certainly magnetic navigation will be vastly more complicated during the multipole state.