Norwegian Air claims speed mark
A Norwegian Air flight has set a record time for the fastest trans-Atlantic flight by a subsonic passenger aircraft, the company claimed.
The European low-cost carrier said the record came on Norwegian Flight
7014, which arrived 53 minutes early on its Jan. 15 run from New York JFK to London Gatwick. Aided by unusually strong tailwinds, the Boeing 787-9 “Dreamliner” operating the flight needed just five hours and 13 minutes to complete its 3,470-mile journey.
That broke the previous record for a non-supersonic trans-Atlantic flight that had been held by British Airways, set in 2015 on a five-hour, 16-minute Boeing 777 flight between New York and London, according to Sky News. Norwegian says the tailwinds for the flight pushed the aircraft to a top speed that would have been equivalent to
776 mph on the ground.
But was it really the fastest transAtlantic flight? It depends on how you define “trans-Atlantic.”
A Vickers VC-10 passenger aircraft flew from New York to Glasgow, Scotland, in just five hours, 1 minute, in
1979. Flights from St. John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, regularly make it to London in less than five hours. Similarly, Boston-Dublin flights often crack the five-hour threshold.
Still, the popular New York-London run has long been considered as a standard for trans-Atlantic flying, so Norwegian’s record holds up if the parameters are narrowed.
Norwegian’s five-hour, 13-minute crossing also doesn’t come close to the overall record set for the fastest transAtlantic crossing on passenger jet. In
1996, a British Airways Concorde flying from New York JFK to London Heathrow crossed the Atlantic in just two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds.