Jet stream pushes airliner’s 7,000+ km journey to the limits
The flight from Seattle to Madrid took more than eight hours
A powerful jet stream over the northern Atlantic Ocean helped a brand new jet make an unusually lengthy flight on Wednesday.
The single-aisle passenger jet flew nonstop from Seattle to Madrid, covering an impressive distance of nearly 7,200 kilometres.
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A Boeing 737-MAX 8 aircraft left Seattle, Washington, on Wednesday, May 13, bound for Madrid, Spain. The flight plan called for a refuelling stop in Glasgow, Scotland, along the way.
Aviation news website Simple Flying notes that this flight was likely the brand-new jet’s delivery flight to Air Europa.
The plane never stopped to top off the tanks. According to flight tracking data, the crew diverted away from Glasgow and continued straight through to Madrid, landing after an eight-and-a-half hour trip from Seattle.
Boeing says that the 737-MAX 8 has a normal range of about 6,480 kilometres. But that’s during normal operations when the airliner is packed with nearly 200 passengers and the cargo to match.
Delivery flights have no passengers and no cargo weighing them down, usually allowing the pilots to extend beyond the plane’s normal range. This particular flight also had the weather working in its favour.
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A strong ridge of high pressure over the northern Atlantic Ocean forced the jet stream to bend over Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, directly along the flight path.
Powerful winds aloft gave the plane the extra boost it needed to conserve enough fuel to make it to Madrid without stopping. Flight trackers show that the plane’s ground speed exceeded 950 km/h at one point.
Thousands of planes take advantage of jet streams every day in order to save fuel and cut down on flight times. This is usually why it takes less time to fly east than it does to travel west in the northern hemisphere.
Header image created using graphics and imagery from Canva.