It’s normal for flights to be shorter heading east from North America to Europe than from Europe to North America thanks to the prevailing westerly wind and jet stream. You often shave 30 minutes to sometimes an hour of your flight heading from North America to Europe compared to heading west into the prevailing wind.
Every so often during the heart of winter when the jet stream is strongest, flight times can be even shorter. My wife and I flew from Chicago to Amsterdam in February 2007 and thanks to a powerful tail wind in excess of 200 mph, our flight time was about 7 hours.
In January 2015, thanks to a 200+mph jet stream, several flights on the night of January 7-8th made it from New York’s JFK to London Heathrow in just 5 hours 20 minutes with flight BA114 making the trip in 5 hours, 16 minutes which is said to have been a new subsonic record for the route.
According to Flight Aware, the jet’s groundspeed (relative to ground) at one point reached 745 mph. Remarkably this is just shy of the 761 mph speed of sound!
Credit: FlightAware
Credit: FlightAware
Flight AA121 flying from Paris CDG to JFK needed to make a fuel stop in Bangor, Maine after flying further north over Greenland to avoid the strong westerly headwinds.
Credit: FlightAware
Note the flight time of 8 hours 7 minutes just to reach Maine.
New Record Set in 2018
It appears a Norwegian Air Boeing 787 Dreamliner is claiming a new record short flight time between JFK and LHR of 5 hours 13 minutes on 15 January 2018.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/954411013142609928
The airline said that the plane was propelled to a top groundspeed of 776 mph thanks to a 202 mph jet stream on it’s back.
https://twitter.com/SimonLeeWx/status/955109797275361282
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/953480280102318080
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/955861108241457153
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/953520826153922560
An excellent piece from LIVE SCIENCE
How a Norwegian Jetliner Just Set a Trans-Atlantic Speed Record
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | January 23, 2018 01:30pm ET
Zip! There goes a Norwegian airplane, hauling tail across the North Atlantic. Zap! There goes another one.
What’s going on here? Turns out, an unusually fast jet stream is offering commercial jets the chance make the crossing at unheard-of speeds, and the airline Norwegian has taken full advantage of the opportunity, Wired reported today (Jan. 23). One recent Norwegian flight hit a cruising speed of 770 miles per hour (1,239 kilometers per hour), Wired reported. Another, a Boeing 787, hit a peak speed of 779 mph (1,254 kmph). That’s blistering by passenger flight standards — typically, commercial jets cruise at about 550 mph (885 kmph), according to MIT.
All that added speed helped Norwegian set a new record for the transatlantic crossing. As the aircraft-tracking site Flightradar24 confirmed, Norwegian flight DY7014 took off at JFK airport in New York City Jan. 15 and landed just 5 hours and 13 minutes later at London Gatwick Airport — three minutes faster than the previous record, set in 2015, and half an hour faster than usual.
Physics-savvy readers might wonder what a Boeing 787 — not a supersonic jet — was doing at supersonic-sounding speeds. At 35,000 feet, the cruising altitude of a typical passenger jet, sound travels at about 660 mph (1,062 kmph). So why didn’t the Norwegian planes land full of passengers rattled from a journey across the sound barrier?
As Wired reported, a 779 mph ground speed does not translate to moving 779 miles per hour through the air. That plane reached that high speed with a tailwind of 224 mph (360 kmph) — which means the air moving over the airplane’s wing was only moving at an effective speed of about 555 mph (893 kmph), well short of the speed of sound. So relative to its surrounding air, the jet never breached the speed of sound, which meant it — and the passengers on board — never felt any of the effects.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Sergey Kustov
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