“This jet is heading east. [stream]There will be a significant tailwind.” Japan Meteorological Bureau I have written on X (formerly Twitter).
Virgin Atlantic Flight 22 from Washington Dulles International Airport to London took off at 10:45 p.m. Saturday and landed 45 minutes ahead of schedule.
Buoyed by extreme tailwinds, the Virgin Atlantic airliner reached a top speed of 802 mph at 11:20pm on Saturday. Online tracker Flight Aware is shown. As it gained altitude and entered the fast flow of the jet stream, it reached its speed over the Atlantic Ocean just east of Long Island.
After leaving the river further north, the speed leveled off at between 600 and 700 mph, still only slightly above normal cruising speed.
The flight’s top speed of 802 mph exceeded the speed of sound (767 mph), but the aircraft was unable to break the sound barrier. Although, ground speed Measurements of the plane’s actual speed combined with the additional propulsion from the wind exceeded the speed of sound, and the plane was still moving through the surrounding air at its normal cruising speed. It just so happened that the air around me was moving unusually fast.
United Airlines Flight 64 from Newark to Lisbon, which departed at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, reached a ground speed of 1,300 km/h just off the East Coast. According to Flight Aware. The plane arrived in Lisbon 20 minutes early. Don’t give up, American Airlines Flight 120 from Philadelphia to Doha, Qatar. Top speed was recorded at around 840 miles per hour.which would rank among the best of all time.
The high-speed flight arrived less than a month after a China Airlines plane reached speeds of 1,326 mph over the Pacific Ocean. It was also propelled over 250 miles per hour by tailwinds. At the time, it was thought that this flight may have set an unofficial civilian flight speed record other than Concorde’s supersonic flight.
Strong mid-Atlantic winds Saturday night were detected by weather balloons launched from the National Weather Service office in Sterling, Virginia. The agency releases weather balloons every 12 hours, and data from the balloons is fed into computer models that help make predictions.
Winds were still howling in Washington Sunday morning. Tom Niziol, Fox Weather’s winter weather expert, said: Posted on X The weather balloon, which launched from Stirling at 7 a.m., recorded winds of 38,000 mph at near 38,000 feet per hour, officials said.
The contrast between very cold air in the northeast and very calm air in the southeast created strong winds. As of 7 p.m. Saturday, temperatures in interior Maine were in the single digits, while in South Florida they were in the 70s.
One reason Washington state received less snow than predicted 24 hours earlier was faster currents in the highlands. This means that the snow only lasted a few hours during the storm’s passage, and the amount of dust was limited to a few inches.
Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.
