Flying right now from Paderborn to Heathrow, wind 252° at 98, did i miss a hurricane?
Quite common for winds aloft to reach well over 100+ knots. Especially when associated with the jetstream. Enjoy the tailwinds if you can!
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Wow, a Cessna would stay aloft without moving forward, lol.
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That’s why the Winds Aloft (at various altitude ranges) will dictate if your route is going to be effective/possible.
I’ve hit three digit streams at FL450 on the Greenland-Iceland-UK routes.
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Yep, I’ve had 100+ kts in the Western US at higher altitudes. It can make that 1 hour flight be considerably longer when its a headwind.
Oh that’s why the pilots flying the opposite route keep smiling at me.
I use Ventusky to check wind speeds at different altitudes before planning a flight. It frequently helps determine the routes where I’ll get knocked around the least.
I remember one flight about a year back at FL300 in the TBM over the Rockies with a 90 kt tail wind. That’s the fastest I’ve ever gone in the TBM to date.
Those aren’t strong winds unless they are a headwind and then any headwind is awful. In the real world I’ve seen over 200 knots at FL370. 100 knot winds would be an overall average wind speed in the 30-40k foot altitude range.
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Here is a real track of a Boeing 777 in a powerful jetstream on 8th Feb 2020 tracking the ground at 817mph. On that same night there was a Boeing 747 which broke the alcomers record for an airliner (excepting Concorde/Tupolev Tu-144) with 825mph ground speed (717kts). Yes, their tracks were actually supersonic relative to the ground.
Here is the story of the record breaking 747.
How A British Airways 747 Once Flew 825mph.
Airliners take advantage of these jetstreams when going with the jetstream, but go a long way out of their way to avoid them when going against the jetstream. In the first picture above, you can see how far north all the planes travelling east to west, so as to keep out of the massive headwind.
Here is a map of the jetstream the night that 747 broke the record.
And here is one I did in the sim with the A320FBW and real world weather on 6th Feb this year with another strong jetstream, with 788mph/685kts GS. You can see the wind strength at the top of the picture at 213mph/185kts. It’s only possible to manually set the wind in the sim up to 150kts, so you can tell this was real world weather.
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I’ve only broken 600kts once (IRL). Right place at the right time (and maybe a little bit of fiddling with selected speed)…
I also had this once during climbout from Cyprus though this was due to GPS jamming from Syria.
Thanks for the sim and real world examples folks. I think the Topic Author’s question was more than adequately addressed.