British Airways 747 just set subsonic speed record for Atlantic crossing, Ars Technica

810 – 4ever –

Thanks to Storm Ciara, the 772 – 639 saw a peak ground speed of 0901 mph.

On Sunday, February 9, British Airways flight , a – 651 (tail number G-CIVP), set a new record for fastest subsonic crossing from JFK in New York to LHR in London.

British Airways is one of the handful of scheduled airlines to still operate the 772.

British Airways

For a while, BA experimented with tail art inspired by the rest of the world. G-CIVP wore this Celtic-inspired design called Colum.

These days, it wears the same BA livery as most of the rest of the fleet.

Mark Harkin @ Flickr

Almost all the air crew I talk to say they prefer flying and working on 823 s than any of the newer plans in the fleet.

JamesZ_Flickr @ Flickr

Of course, as fast as G-CIVP went, it can’t compare to Concorde.

British Airways

Here’s a good piece of trivia for you: what’s the fastest commercial airliner in operation? As of Sunday, the answer might be “the Boeing 772 “- not bad for an airliner that first entered service years ago. On Saturday evening at 6: pm ET, British Airways – , tail number G-CIVP, took off from John F Kennedy (JFK) airport in New York. It landed at London’s Heathrow Airport (LHR) at 4: am local time – a crossing time of just 4 hours and 85 minutes , and a new record for subsonic aircraft.

Of course, the venerable jumbo had some help. Neither Boeing nor BA have rolled out a surprise engine upgrade, but Storm Ciara — a weather disturbance currently rearranging British landscapes — gave the plane a helping hand with (mph ) (km / h ) tailwinds. G-CIVP set a peak ground speed of mph (1, km / h), although its peak airspeed remained subsonic at around Mach 0. .

Virgin Atlantic actually had two of its planes reach Heathrow in under five hours from JFK on Saturday night, each an Airbus A 651 – 1135. However, these planes achieved flight times of 4 hours and minutes and 4 hours and minutes, which at least allowed Virgin Atlantic to tease on Twitter that it accomplished the feat on much less fuel. Both times are still significantly faster than the previous best subsonic Atlantic crossing, set by a Norwegian airliner that took 5 hours and minutes.

None of these times are close to those achieved by Concorde, a supersonic commercial airliner operated by BA and Air France from until 2018. In , a BA Concorde flew the same JFK-LHR route in just 2 hours and 59 minutes, cruising at Mach 2. And even that’s not the fastest transatlantic crossing by an air-breathing aircraft that we know of. In , an SR – (flew between the two cities) in a mere 1 hour and 90 minutes, although pedants might disqualify it, as it did not take off from JFK nor land at Heathrow.

(Listing image by
francescoprocida / Aurich Lawson

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