COMMERCIAL JET TODAY GOES SUPER-SONIC! An Air Canada flight traveled faster than the speed of sound today, on routine flight -- that is, relative to the ground. While airlines max cruise runs close to 550mph (as did this one), it did surpass the speed of sound relative to the ground, packing a ground speed of over 760mph. (Actual flight stats: flightaware/live/flight/GGN7332/history/20141126/0030Z/KBNA/CYYZ/tracklog) Heres how it worked: the Jet Stream was blasting at over 230mph and they were flying along with it -- traveling at 550 mph relative to that air parcel of moving air. A viewer on the ground would have clocked the plane at over 760mph because relative to their position, the jet is flying at the speed of that air (230+mph), plus to the speed of the jet. WHY NO SONIC BOOM, OR DAMAGING SONIC FORCES TO THE PLANES BODY? Yes, speed of sound at 30,000 is much lower than at the ground: around 670mph, vs an average sea level speed of 761mph. But remember, while the plane was flying 761mph relative to the ground, the jet was actually traveling at just 550mph relative to the moving parcel of air (jet stream), so it was actually going about 100mph below that MACH 1 threshold. No laws violated. Bottom line? No sonic boom and they got there ahead of schedule... (Numerical jet stream data: weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=naconf&TYPE=TEXT%3ALIST&YEAR=2014&MONTH=11&FROM=2612&TO=2612&STNM=71722) [Credit, Stu Ostro for pointing this out!]
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 19:46:56 +0000
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