Chrisj,
They have just made them longer in a way - I used to fly to Miami on Concorde in four and a half hours if you don't include the stop for fuel in Washington!!
Chrisj,
They have just made them longer in a way - I used to fly to Miami on Concorde in four and a half hours if you don't include the stop for fuel in Washington!!
Don't the return flights head strainght across the atlantic sometimes as well?
All flights follow the great circle route as I explained above. If they went in a "straight line" as I assume you mean by drawing on a flat map then they would be travelling many hundreds if not thousands of miles extra as it just is not the direct route between the two places. The earth is curved and thus the quickest route is as they currently do it.
<blockquote id="quote" class="ffs">quote:Originally posted by ujpest doza
Don't the return flights head strainght across the atlantic sometimes as well?
[/quote]
No - all aircraft follow the great circle route - it is all the more so for Concorde to do as it is range limited and thus has to find the most fuel efficient route between two points.
Concorde was built for the London / Paris to New York route and anything longer than that e.g. Washington, meant it could not normally carry a full load as it simply would not have enought fuel to get there non-stop.
<blockquote id="quote" class="ffs">quote:Originally posted by chrisj
I think the only plane that went straight across was concorde ???
[/quote]
I'm pretty sure we have come back a different route than we went. Maybe I'm a little off but I thought we headed up the East coast but started out across the Atlantic a little sooner than Canada. On the way over I remember seeing all the icy mountain ranges around the Labrador Sea (Nova Scotia??). It was beautiful.
On the way back we might, I think, have started back across the ocean about Washington?
Maybe?
Brizzle.
That's because they adjust the flight paths according to forcast high altitude winds to make a trade off between great circle routings and wind speed.
If there are stronger tailwinds at a slightly different latitude than the true great circle route then it may or may not make economic sense to take this route as the fuel (and time) saved being blown along by a strong wind may or may not outweigh the extra fuel required to deviate from the true great circle route.
<blockquote id="quote" class="ffs">quote:Originally posted by brizzle
I'm pretty sure we have come back a different route than we went. Maybe I'm a little off but I thought we headed up the East coast but started out across the Atlantic a little sooner than Canada. On the way over I remember seeing all the icy mountain ranges around the Labrador Sea (Nova Scotia??). It was beautiful.
On the way back we might, I think, have started back across the ocean about Washington?
Maybe?
Brizzle.
[/quote]
That makes sense as it was 2 hours quicker on the return flight than the outbound flight. Very nice.
Brizzle
'who will be keeping a close eye on the map next Tuesday to check if the circle is really *that* great'
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