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Planes top 800 mph as near-record winds sweep high over Mid-Atlantic

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

(Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/18/record-jet-stream-winds-dc-flights/ – text specially adapted for this test)

When the author says the airplane “landed ahead of schedule by 45 minutes” (l. 10) it means the flight arrived: