Video capturing the ‘real speed of planes’ shows just how fast they actually go
It's no surprise that commercial aircraft fly exceptionally fast – after all, how did you think it was possible to get from London to New York in just eight hours?
The cruising speed of a Boeing 737 - the world's most common commercial aircraft - is approximately 490-525 mph, while long-haul aircraft can hit speeds of 560 mph. Private jets, meanwhile, can reach even greater speeds, with planes like the Gulfstream G700 able to fly nearly 700 mph.
Which for context, is 10 times the average speed limit of a UK motorway.
And yet it never feels like we're going particularly fast while in the air. Similarly, the planes we can see from the sky never seem to be going anywhere fast.
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Turns out there's actually an explanation for this: Motion Parallax.
Motion Parallax explained
Motion Parallax is based on how quickly an object moves through our field of vision.
So a car driving very fast on the motorway with things moving past very quickly appears to be faster than a plane up in the sky, which lingers in our field of vision for much longer. However, this TikTok video bypasses the Motion Parallax and shows just how quick planes really are.
In fact, the Boeing 737 seen in the video, which is a common workhorse airliner, has a cruising speed of an eye-watering 545mph. No wonder in the video it whizzes by so quickly!
What's crazy is that in aeronautical terms, this isn't really that quick. It's fast alright, but there are many many types of aircraft capable of achieving much faster speeds.
The supersonic passenger jet Concorde, for example, had a cruising speed of just over 1340mph, allowing it to make Atlantic crossings in record time.
However, even this pales in comparison to the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever manufactured. This was the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird. First designed and built in the 1960s, the SR-71 was intended for use as a reconnaissance aircraft operating at high altitudes.
It's outfitted with stealth technology, but is also so fast it could actually outrun surface-to-air missiles. Its maximum speed was clocked in at an astonishing 2,200mph.
All these are truly astonishing speeds, but even the relatively snail-like Boeing 737 is still very fast, as one video shows.
Rather than the usual squinting at an aircraft from a great distance away, the video shows an airliner flying past in the clouds, looking like it's just cruising to its destination.
Given how high up you are when going at the cruising speed, and how the plane hopefully slows down when it comes in to land, the video looks really rather alarming. The jet absolutely shoots past. It almost doesn't look real.
It's bizarre to think we as people can now just hop into a bus that then jets up into the sky and hurtles through the air at over 500mph, powered by dead dinosaurs.
As for how planes actually stay up, there's really on point pretending that anyone actually knows or understands. Engineers say they do but really they're all just winging it.
Sure you can say stuff about thrust and air pressure and lift, but it's still basically just magic.
Kit Roberts