A monster storm bearing down on the United Kingdom has swept a flight from New York to London in record-breaking time.
As Ciara – now dubbed "the storm of the century" – charges into Britain, airlines are taking advantage of unusually strong wind currents over the Atlantic to make history. But they are also riding a weird quirk of physics – a fast-moving global conveyor belt long known to migrating birds and airlines alike.
The currents form when hot and cold air collide and can reach speeds of more than 440 kilometres per hour. According to Craig Burke, a senior aviation meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, the wind has to be faster than 100km/h, or it's not a jet stream.Getty Images and helped spawn storm Ciara. All up it took the plane just four hours and 56 minutes to get from JFK to Heathrow – beating a previous subsonic record for the crossing of five hours and 13 minutes set by a Norwegian flight about a year earlier. A Virgin Atlantic Airbus that landed at Heathrow moments behind the British Airways flight was only a minute slower, another plane the following morning just three minutes behind.
"If you're facing down a stream blowing the wrong way, you might have to drop altitude or shift course," Dell says. "Even if you're going the right way, it can be a bumpy ride. The air tends to get a bit rough around the edges of a jet stream."A phenomenon known as clear air turbulence, which is virtually impossible to detect with either on board instruments or the naked eye, is often associated with the wild currents.