Norwegian plane sets speed record over the Atlantic

Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners.Photo Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA

With a flight time of 5 hours and 13 minutes from New York to London, a Norwegian Airline Dreamliner set a new record for passenger airplanes that fly beneath the sound barrier.

 

The Concorde crossed the Atlantic in approximately three hours in 1996, but for so-called subsonic planes, the previous record was 5 hours and 16 minutes, reported TV 2. That was before Norwegian broke the record on Monday.

With a tailwind of up to 325 kilometres per hour, the aircraft was cruising at a speed of 1,249 kilometres per hour. That’s faster than the speed of sound, but the plane’s velocity through the air, due to wind, was significantly lower, so it was never near the sound barrier.

Captain Harold van Dam told the Telegraph newspaper that he could have flown even faster if no turbulence had slowed the plane.

 

© NTB Scanpix / Norway Today