The Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London’s Heathrow Airport exceeded 800 mph as it traveled over Pennsylvania on Monday night. The typical cruising speed of the Dreamliner is 567 mph, according to Aerotime News Hub. Although the boost didn’t last for the entire flight, it did allow the commercial airliner to arrive at its destination a whopping 48 minutes early. © AP Photo / Nick Ut Virgin Atlantic Considers Starting Flights to Moscow – Richard Branson And while the plane did get past the speed of sound, which is recorded at 760 mph, the flight didn’t actually break the sound barrier, since the plane’s speed was the result of the jet stream, not the plane’s engines. According to the Drive, the discrepancy can be explained by the difference in groundspeed, which measures how fast a plane appears to be flying from the vantage point of someone on the ground, and airspeed, which is how fast an aircraft is traveling compared to the air around it. “From the perspective of the [Federal Aviation Administration’s] ground-based tracking systems, the Virgin Boeing would seem to be going supersonic over the Northeast, while the passengers and crew would have felt as though their plane was cruising along at a nice, happy Mach 0.85 or so,” the publication explained. Either way, the measured speeds left experts shocked as they witnessed the series of events… Read full this story
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