5 hours and 13 minutes is the fastest journey since the time of Concorde.

The old record for non-supersonic aircraft was 5 hours and 16 minutes, set in 2015 by a British Airways Boeing 777.

The tailwind for Norwegian NAS +0.5%s, a Boeing Dreamliner, is reported to be up to 90 metres per second, or 325 kilometres per hour — more than double that of a hurricane.

Airline captain Harold van Dam told the British Daily Mail that the plane, during its flight on Monday, was at times travelling at supersonic speeds, as measured from the ground. However, because the air around the plane was moving in the same direction so quickly, they never broke the sound barrier.

”Had it not been for predicted lower-altitude turbulence, we could have flown even faster,” says van Dam.

The average speed over the approximately 560-mile stretch between JFK and Gatwick airports was 1,070 kilometres per hour. As a result, the 284 passengers arrived about an hour earlier than scheduled on Monday evening.

So, the idea of ”arriving before you've departed” across the Atlantic is once again becoming a topic of discussion – a popular joke during the Concorde era, when thanks to a six-hour time difference, you could leave London at lunchtime and reach New York that same morning.

The supersonic aircraft Concorde made the journey in three hours. However, the British-French aircraft was incredibly expensive and a fuel guzzler. A crash in France in July 2000 was the trigger for stopping its service three years later.

Source: TT