British Airways Boeing 747-436 flies from NYC to London in less than 5 hours

The gold-tipped Boeing 747 bringing Britain’s Olympic athletes home, arrives back from the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil, at Heathrow airport in London on August 23, 2016. Twenty years after a stinging Olympic failure, Britain has risen from the ashes to become a sporting “superpower”. Rival nations have been left confounded by Team GB’s cool performance with 27 golds out of 67 won in Rio which gave them second place in the medals table behind the United States. / AFP / Justin TALLIS (Photo credit should read JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

by: Staff | newsweb@everythinglubbock.com

Posted: Feb 15, 2020 / 08:04 PM CST

Updated: Feb 15, 2020 / 08:05 PM CST

LONDON — A British Airways Boeing 747-436 benefited from the powerful transatlantic jetstream created by Storm Ciara to set a new subsonic speed record for a New York-London flight.

The Boeing 747-436 reached speeds of 825 mph (1,327 km/h) as it rode a jet stream accelerated by Storm Ciara.

The 22-year-old 747, operating flight BA112 on February 8 & 9th, completed the flight from New York John F. Kennedy airport to London’s Heathrow in four hours and 56 minutes, 80 minutes ahead of schedule on Sunday morning. The flight was some 1 hour and 20 minutes faster than scheduled for the route.

According to Flightradar24, an online flight tracking service, it beat a previous five hours 13 minutes record held by Norwegian.

A Virgin Atlantic Airbus A350-1000 was only 1 minute slower than the BA 747-436, operating flight VS4. However, the airline pointed out that while it was “narrowly beaten”, the 747 had “twice the number of engines and burnt twice as much fuel” as the A350 twinjet.

The fastest-ever crossing between New York and London was flown by a British Airways Concorde on February 7, 1996, when it completed the route in a record 2 hours 52 minutes and 59 seconds. The supersonic airliner had a cruise speed of Mach 2, equivalent to 1,350 mph.