Record of a PLL LOT plane on the route from the USA. They returned to Poland at the “speed of sound”

The popular Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner of LOT Polish Airlines covered the route from Newark-Liberty (located in New Jersey, but it is one of the three main airports in New York) to Warsaw Chopin Airport in just 6 hours and 55 minutes. This is a new flight record on this route.

New flight record from New York to Warsaw. Less than seven hours

Krzysztof Moczulski, spokesman for PLL LOT, announced the record breaking on the X website. “After entering the jetstream slot, it reached GS [ground speed, czyli względem Ziemi – red.] up to 665 kts. (knots, i.e. 1,230 km/h) and arrived in Warsaw an hour before the scheduled time,” Moczulski wrote. “The Captain of this flight doesn’t even remember such a flight time,” he added in one of the comments.

According to data from the Flightradar24 website, flight LO16 took off from an airport in the USA on October 31 at 23:45 (10 minutes late), and landed in Poland at 11:40 on November 1. This means that – despite a slight start delay – the machine arrived 65 minutes before the scheduled time. The total flight time was 6 hours and 55 minutes – it was one hour and 15 minutes shorter than the scheduled time and 35 minutes shorter than the average on this route.

LOT’s Dremliner accelerated to a speed of over 600 knots (1,111 km/h) over Rhode Island, and the highest speeds (ranging from 650-665 knots) were achieved over Newfoundland, Canada. A high speed of over 600 knots was maintained for approximately half of the total route. Over the Atlantic (halfway between Newfoundland and Ireland), the machine slowed down to just over 500 knots (926 km/h) and at this speed it reached Poland.

The record speed of 665 knots, or 1,230 km/h, means that the Polish carrier’s plane was temporarily moving faster than the “speed of sound”. It is worth noting, however, that it did not break the sound barrier. The speed of sound is 1,225 km/h (at a temperature of 15 degrees Celsius and normal atmospheric pressure), but the speed of the plane is relative to the Earth’s surface. The speed of the LOT Boeing in relation to the surrounding air was then approximately 1,000 km/h.

How is this possible? All because of the exceptionally strong jet stream

Of course, the record flight time is not the result of the unusual imagination of pilots who decided to check the performance of their machine, but of the exceptionally strong jet stream that has been occurring over the North Atlantic for several days. It is a very slender and low air stream moving at considerable speed from west to east.

Typically, the wind speed inside the jet stream is over 100 km/h, but currently the air is moving through it at speeds of up to 320 km/h. This fact is readily used by planes on transatlantic routes, which can reach their destination faster and use less fuel. LOT pilots used the performance of their Dreamliner (maximum speed of approx. 1,000 km/h) and strong tailwind (approx. 200 km/h – as revealed by the carrier’s spokesman in one comment on X) to achieve extremely high speed in the air .

reaching (usually near the coast of Newfoundland, where the jet stream is the strongest) speeds exceeding even 1,250 km/h.

Interestingly, thanks to the presence of a very strong jet stream in February 2020, a record was broken on the extremely popular route from New York to London. The British Airways Boeing 747 completed the route in just 4 hours and 56 minutes, while the typical travel time between these cities is just under 7 hours. Using the jet stream, a maximum speed of almost 1,330 km/h was achieved. However, this is still far from the performance of the famous Concorde, which, flying at a cruising speed of approximately 2,150 km/h, transported passengers from New York to England in an average of 3.5 hours.