A British Airways plane has broken the record for fastest subsonic flight—by going faster than the speed of sound. The flight from New York to London arrived almost two hours early after a flight lasting 4 hours and 56 minutes. British Airways also just narrowly beat two Virgin Airways flights that took one minute and three minutes longer, respectively.
What happened? Well, the jet stream was much more powerful than usual, blowing more than 200 miles per hour (mph) and carrying the planes at that high ambient speed. On Friday, the Washington Post predicted the wildly fast flights and shared a thorough analysis. The overall weather system causing the super-fast jet stream linking New York and London came from a “bomb cyclone” near Greenland.
The storm system generates hurricane-force winds at its source, then those winds significantly mellow out to “just” 200 mph further away. The Washington Post explains that storms closer to the north and south poles are larger and their force dissipates more quickly than storms at lower latitudes.
Read more: yahoo
