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BBC News - announce fastest subsonic cross Atlantic crossing


JohnT

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Just working away and heard the hourly news bulletin saying a British Airways 747 just made the fastest subsonic crossing of the Atlantic by far.  I guess a strong tail wind with the storm.  Saying speeds equivalent to over 800 mph

 

Must be windy up there today - certainly windy down here. 

 

just found

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/storm-ciara-flight-record-new-york-london-time-atlantic-winds-british-airways-a9325396.html

 

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Recent wind speeds reported by some of the main UK airports - summarised by Flightradar24:

 

East Midlands 39 kts, 54 kts gusts

London Stansted 31 kts, 44 kts gusts

London Gatwick 23 kts, 39 kts gusts

London Heathrow 23 kts, 33 kts gusts

London Luton 24 kts, 41 kts gusts

Manchester 21 kts, 34 kts gusts

 

Lots of pilots and air traffic controllers earning their salaries today !

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Supersonic and transonic are defined with respect to the air it's travelling through. According to that article, which does indeed cite subsonic flight, the jet stream was 200 MPH.

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7 hours ago, Kushan_Farsight said:

Would this technically have been supersonic at points then? i.e above Mach 1

At no point. The maximum mach number a 747 can travel is something like mach .90. That's 90% of the local speed of sound The speed of sound varies with temperature. There's a formula to work it out, now long forgotten. The lower the temperature the lower the speed. So in theory the 747 crew might have maintained the highest mach number and descended to find the highest temperature while remaining in the jet stream. It's somewhat implied in the BA statement. Would have burned a lot of fuel though. 

Speed over the ground has nothing to do with speed though the air. 

 

That speed might be bettered again in the next few days. The wind is still very strong. 

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That's impressive! My personal best groundspeed was 686kt in a 777-300ER doing M0.85 (it was hovering around 666kt at M0.84 but that didn't seem right so we tweaked it up a bit).

 

The strongest jetstream I ever flew in was just shy of 200kt over eastern Asia but sadly it was a headwind 😫 G/S was 249kt and it took us 13 1/2 hours block time back from Shanghai. (Was also my biggest fuel load at 115t and we burned 110t. I have a lot of carbon offsetting to do...)

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24 minutes ago, ptmvarsityfan said:

I seem to recall reading that the previous fastest subsonic transatlantic crossing was by a VC10, a shame if another British record is beaten!

Cheers, Paul

It wasn’t, previous record was a Norwegian 787-9, and before thar it was BA 777-200, probably a few others since the vc10 days 

Edited by PhantomBigStu
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I flew back from JFK on one of the last Concorde flights into London.  In his chat, beforehand, the Flight Engineer told us that this was his last ever flight on Concord and that would get the aircraft as high and as fast as possible, and so we were able to see the curvature of the Earth as we traveled at 1.425 mph at 60.000 ft and there wasn't a ripple on the champagne.  In contrast, my Grandson is flying out to Montreal on Wednesday hoping that Ciara has eased off a little.   Robin.   

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8 hours ago, JohnT said:

Bet you are glad you were not going the other way into wind 

Bet he is. Not like Alan P in his post above. 249kts 😒. Ouch! 

 

Having said that, particularly on the west bound transatlantic routes, tracks are chosen daily to minimise/maximise headwinds/tailwinds. 

 

That's why on some days the skies above you might be be full of contrails. Totally empty the next as the track is moved. 

 

Edited by noelh
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Record beaten by G-CIVP - It's nice that it was one of the more colourful birds - just a shame it wasn't the Landor or BOAC one though. 

 

The aircraft may be American built, but it's a British record once more.

 

Cheers,

  WV908

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2 hours ago, Robin said:

I flew back from JFK on one of the last Concorde flights into London.  In his chat, beforehand, the Flight Engineer told us that this was his last ever flight on Concord and that would get the aircraft as high and as fast as possible, and so we were able to see the curvature of the Earth as we traveled at 1.425 mph at 60.000 ft and there wasn't a ripple on the champagne. 

I recall a documentary on tv many years ago on Concorde and the guy being interviewed was talking about the early days. One lady passenger spoke to him after the display was showing over Mach 2 and said it’s a little disappointing that there was no bang or bump as they went through the sound barrier. It was entirely without any sensation or drama.  He said  his response was “Yes Madam. That was the difficult bit when designing her” 

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