Storm Ciara winds cause fastest ever New York to London flight

9 February 2020, 15:47

A British Airways flight from New York to London is thought to have made the fastest ever transatlantic flight by a conventional airliner.

The Boeing 747-436 made the 3,500-mile transatlantic journey in just 4 hours and 56 minutes, helped by strong tailwinds as Storm Ciara blew in.

The BA112 flight, which took off from John F Kennedy airport, was scheduled to land at Heathrow at 6.25am on Sunday but arrived 102 minutes early at 4.43am.

According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, the plane was one minute faster than Virgin Atlantic's flight VS4 which was due to land around the same time.

The Virgin Airbus A350-1041 made the same flight in four hours and 57 minutes.

BA said in a statement: "We always prioritise safety over speed records, but our highly trained pilots made the most of the conditions to get customers back to London well ahead of time."

The airline regained the subsonic record from Norwegian, whose Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner flew from New York to London Gatwick in five hours and 13 minutes in 2018.

Flights travelling in the opposite direction were taking more than two and a half hours longer.

The quickest transatlantic passenger flight was set by Concorde in 1996 - which flew at more than twice the speed of sound for a journey of two hours and 52 minutes.