British Airways flight 274, an Airbus A350, reached a ground speed of 814mph and shaved 45 minutes off its journey from Las Vegas to Heathrow, according to flight radar records. The record for subsonic speed is 835mph and the typical cruise speed is about 600mph. Jet streams are fast-moving winds that flow about 30,000ft above the Earth’s surface and blow across the Atlantic to the UK. Airlines use the winds to save fuel between the United States and Europe and they are also why it is faster to fly in that direction than the other way, though flights propelled by jet streams may experience more turbulence.
The subsonic record was set in 2020 on a New York to London flight that lasted only four hours and 56 minutes, two hours and four minutes faster than the average journey time for that route.
The subsonic speed record currently stands at 835mph
Other flights have come close recently. The same week a Qatar Airways flight from New York to Doha reached 833mph and landed about 50 minutes early.
The speed of sound is 760mph, but in these instances the aircraft ground speeds are not classified as supersonic because they were still flying at typical cruising speeds relative to the air.
The record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight was set in 1996 by a British Airways Concorde, which flew from John F Kennedy airport in New York to Heathrow in two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds.