Why is faster to fly east

Gas Prices. Bluff City Life. About Us. Meet The Team. Editorial Board. Latest Newscasts. Investigate TV. Gray DC Bureau. By Brittney Bryant. Published: Dec. Share on Facebook. Email This Link. Share on Twitter. Share on Pinterest. Last February, a British Airways beat the transatlantic subsonic speed record thanks to strong jet streams. The aircraft made the JFK to LHR hop in just four and fifty-five minutes, a brand new record, flying at the speed of over miles per hour.

In short, jet streams can drastically cut down flight times and reduce fuel burn , both their important revenue and environmental concerns for airlines. While this sounds like a win-win for passengers and airlines, there are some drawbacks.

While jet streams can speed up flights, they do have a significant drawback: clear air turbulence. Clear air turbulence CAT is sudden severe turbulence that occurs in a cloudless sky, causing violent shaking of the aircraft.

It occurs when a slow jet stream interacts with a fast jet stream, creating a pocket of extreme disturbance. CAT is also impossible to visually detect or by aircraft radar, unlike other forms of turbulence. This means flying through jet streams will only become riskier in the coming years. This happens to be the exact route when jet streams were first used on a commercial route. Sudden CAT caused the aircraft to fall feet, causing severe spine and neck injuries to 18 passengers.

Studies seen in Travel and Leisure have shown that passengers suffer from more jet lag on eastbound flights, which means shorter flights leave lesser time to adjust and grab some shut-eye on such long-haul routes. In summary, jet streams are the reason why flights take shorter when flying from the west to the east, than the other way around.

While they do help to shave off a few hours off extremely long flights in some cases, they do come with some significant drawbacks too. They can be thousands of miles long and are found all over the earth.

To be called a jet stream, the wind must be moving faster than 60 mph. Jet streams generally blow from the west to the east around the Earth, often following a meandering, curved path just like a river on land. The jet stream over the United States never stays in one place — it tends to move farther south and blow stronger in the winter , and to move farther north and not blow as strong in the summer. Airplane pilots measure speed in two different ways.

First is airspeed — how fast the wind would feel if you stuck your hand out the window. The second is ground speed — how fast the plane is moving over the ground. When you fly in the jet stream, your airspeed always stays the same, but your ground speed can change a lot because the air around the plane is moving.

On the way to Hawaii, I was flying with an airspeed of mph. But because the jet stream was blowing against my airplane — called a headwind — at mph, I was actually only moving across the ground at mph. But flying from Hawaii to New Jersey, the jet stream blows from behind the plane and pushes it forward.