In a New York-Tokyo Flight, would it be quicker to?
Fly from New York to the west coast, and transfer on a flight across the Pacific or fly across the Atlantic to Europe, and transfer on a flight to Tokyo?
Air Travel - 5 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
Easier (and probably shorter) to fly across to Europe and over
2 :
Assuming that you get the connecting flights right traveling west would be a lot faster Westbound JFK-SFO 2586miles + SFO -NRT 5124 mi. =7710 miles Eastbound JFK-LHR 3451 miles + LHR-NRT 5974 mi.=9425 For a diiference of 1715 miles I searched the web for "the great circle route" and came up with a site called Great Circle Mapper which is apparentley used by pilots The sites address is gc.kis2.com
3 :
Most likely quicker to go to Europe. The winds prevail out of the west at these latitudes, so you will have a tailwind going east. This time of the year, it's not uncommon to see winds aloft of 60 to 120 knots. For easy math, call it 100 knots. That will add 100 knots to the speed of an airplane going east and subtract 100 knots going west (200 knot groundspeed difference between them). Multiply that out over 15 hours of flying, and you can go up to 3,000 miles farther eastbound than you can westbound in the same amount of time... The return trip is a different story. Take the Pacific route on the way home. <EDIT:> I answered assuming the situation that you wanted to make a connection and you were considering, for example, San Fransisco vs. Amsterdam. In reality, there ARE indeed plenty of direct flights, probably passing over northern Alaska. A route like that would be much quicker.
4 :
Actually ANA and Japan Airlines both fly from New York to Tokyo direct. I think they cross over the North Pole. It would definitely take longer to fly through Europe to get to Japan.
5 :
a NYC to Tokyo flight with a connection traveling west is approx 19h05mns, give or take. A non-stop over the polar route on Continental is 14h00mns...you choose. I know of no airline that flies to Tokyo from NY that builds a connection anywhere thru Europe.
