Winds roared to speeds of 265 mph high over Washington — at about 35,000 feet above ground, cruising altitude for airplanes — as a powerful jet stream swept over the region late Saturday. These winds allowed at least three commercial aircraft to reach speeds over 800 mph.
The National Weather Service office serving the Washington-Baltimore region said the 265-mph wind speed was the second-highest measured since records began in the 1950s. The only higher wind speed recorded at a comparable altitude was 267 mph on Dec. 6, 2002.
“For those flying eastbound in this jet [stream], there will be quite a tailwind,” the Weather Service wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Virgin Atlantic Flight 22, from Washington Dulles International Airport to London, took off at 10:45 p.m. Saturday and landed ahead of schedule by 45 minutes.
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Boosted by the extreme tailwind, the Virgin Atlantic jet reached a peak speed of 802 mph at 11:20 p.m. Saturday, data from the online tracker Flight Aware indicated. It attained that velocity over the Atlantic Ocean just east of Long Island as it was gaining altitude and entering the jet stream’s fast flow.
After it exited that stream farther north, its speed leveled off to between 600 and 700 mph, which is still a bit faster than typical cruising speed.
While the flight’s peak speed of 802 mph was higher than the speed of sound (767 mph), the aircraft did not break the sound barrier. Although its ground speed — a measure that combines the plane’s actual speed and the additional push from the wind — was greater than the speed of sound, it was still moving through the surrounding air at its ordinary cruise speed. It just so happened that the surrounding air was moving unusually fast.
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United Airlines Flight 64 from Newark to Lisbon, which departed at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, reached a ground speed of 835 mph just off the East Coast, according to Flight Aware. The flight reached Lisbon 20 minutes early. Not be outdone, American Airlines Flight 120 from Philadelphia to Doha, Qatar, topped out near 840 mph, which would rank among the highest on record.
The high-speed flights come less than a month after a China Airlines flight reached a speed of 826 mph over the Pacific Ocean. It was also propelled by a tailwind over 250 mph. At the time, it was thought that flight may have set an informal record for commercial flight speeds, not including supersonic Concorde flights.
Saturday night’s powerful winds in the Mid-Atlantic were detected by a weather balloon launched from the Weather Service’s office in Sterling, Va. The office releases weather balloons every 12 hours, and the data from the balloons feeds computer models that aid prediction.
Winds were still roaring in Washington on Sunday morning. Tom Niziol, winter weather expert for Fox Weather, posted to X that the 7 a.m. weather balloon from Sterling clocked winds of 246 mph around 38,000 feet.
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The high winds developed because of the contrast between very cold air over the Northeast and very mild air over the Southeast. At 7 p.m. Saturday, temperatures were as low as the single digits in interior Maine but were in the 70s in South Florida.
The fast high-altitude flow was among several reasons Washington got less snow less than predicted 24 hours earlier. It meant that, as the storm system passed by, snow lasted only two to three hours, limiting amounts to a dusting to a couple of inches.
Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.
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