Sunday, February 9, 2020

British Airways 747 Reached Speeds of 825 mph Riding Jet Stream New York to London

From the BBC:
Storm Ciara helps plane beat transatlantic flight record
Experts are hailing a British Airways flight as the fastest subsonic New York to London journey.
The Boeing 747-436 reached speeds of 825 mph (1,327 km/h) as it rode a jet stream accelerated by Storm Ciara.

The four hours and 56 minutes flight arrived at Heathrow Airport 80 minutes ahead of schedule on Sunday morning.
According to Flightradar24, an online flight tracking service, it beat a previous five hours 13 minutes record held by Norwegian.

The BBC has been unable to independently verify the record as no complete database of flight times was available.

Aviation consultant and former BA pilot Alastair Rosenschein said the aeroplane reached a "phenomenal speed"....

825 mph in a 747 is quite fast.

By comparison the world's fastest plane, the SR-71 did the run, 3,461.53 miles, in 1hr 54 min 56.4 secs for an Average Speed of 1,806.95 statute mph.
While carrying only two people.
It did have to slow down for the refueling tanker though.