Hey aviation nerds,
So today two things happened that I would have never thought to happen ever again.
A) I’m posting a topic on the forum after roughly two years that felt like a century (cheers to anyone who remembers me)
B) I actually stuck with the featured ATC schedule theme for today… at least kind of.
To gain some flight time while busy doing other things I decided hop into the United Boeing 767 and fly the early morning UAL247 route from Houston (IAH) to Newark (EWR), which is an exceptionally mainstream route for my taste. However, things started to spice up and become more interesting once I had a look at the wind map for my route.
Below, I posted an overlay of a wind map at FL390 and my flight on Liveflight to visualize the flight route. The brighter the colour gets, the higher the windspeed is in this area at FL390 and vice versa.
As you can see, there was a belt of fantastic jetstream-esque tailwind that would almost exactly match my route to Newark.
So, when filing my flight plan, I attempted to follow the tailwind as precisely as possible to take advantage of what the coriolis force offered me and fly the quickest and most economic routing.
A nearly exact tailwind reaching 130 knots at its maximum blasted me all the way up to Newark, which made me fly at a ground speed of up to 1112 kilometers per hour, which - for all you non-metric-affine americans - is ridicolously fast.
In the end, I managed to fly all the 1.300 NM from eastern Texas to New Jersey in only 2 hours and 26 minutes, nearly cutting the average flight time for this route in half.
As you can see, it’s essential in aviation to think outside the plane and analyze what’s happening around it to navigate not only more safe, but also more efficiently.
Happy flying and, above all - stay safe!