That’s because there’s a big difference between a plane’s airspeed and a plane’s ground speed. In this case, the plane, traveling from Los Angeles to London, was propelled by incredibly ...

There are thousands of airplanes in the sky at any given moment. Are there speed limits for passenger planes, or can pilots ...

Confusion between airspeed and ground speed is endemic to aviation, and the Wikipedia article on the An-2 contains an example: “…Pilots of the An-2 have stated that they are capable of flying ...

Since the airplane’s relationship to the air, not the ground ... idea for directly measuring airspeed might come from the world of meteorology. Wind speed can be measured with what is called ...

how fast the plane is moving relative to the ground. Imagine the speed of its shadow. Airspeed is different: it refers to how fast air was passing over the jet’s wings. “It's a bit like ...

ground speed is how fast an airplane is traveling, relative to a fixed point on the ground versus airspeed which is the speed of an aircraft relative to the air through which it is moving.

To determine airspeed — which can vary substantially compared to the speed over the ground due to winds — aircraft rely on Pitot tubes which measure the air rushing into them. By comparing ...