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Tailwind gives Air India a free flight

So strong is the tailwind that the fuel consumption is less despite addition of a huge distance

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When Air India flight AI 173 took off from Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in wee hours of October 15 for San Francisco, not many passengers were aware that their flight is about to make a history.

The non-stop flight on long range Boeing 777-200LR that circumnavigated the earth cruised on what became the world's longest air-route.

Interestingly while 1,000 km were added, the journey time was cut about 2 hours 15 minutes by taking advantage of a jet stream (fast moving tailwind) over North Pacific Ocean.

So strong is the tailwind that the fuel consumption is less despite addition of a huge distance.

The route for return flight AI174 hasn't changed as there isn't any tailwind benefit.

The airline plans to further better the route in January next year and reduce the flight time further, depending upon the changing wind pattern.

Dhananjay Kumar, senior manager, corporate communications, Air India, said each AI173 flight will now save 1 tonne of fuel. “That means every fifth flight will be free for us,” said Kumar.

“Till last week, after starting of flight since December 2015, the route taken was through North Pole and South of Canada,” said Soumen Mukherjee, an industry analyst specialising in airline routes.

While the Delhi-San Francisco flight covered 15,142 km, an increase of around 1,000 off km over the earlier route, the time taken to reach the destination was just 14 hours 30 minutes as against 16 hours 44 minutes earlier.

Gulf-based Emirates's Dubai-Auckland flight (EK 449 on Boeing 777-200LR, started in March 2016) till now held the title of longest non-stop flight covering 14,203 km but it is still the longest in terms of flight duration at 17 hours 15 minutes.

Vinay Bhaskara, a senior business analyst with US-based aviation news website Airways News, said almost every airline in the world uses some of these principles on a daily basis, mainly in how the pilots do flight planning.

“Many of them will adjust their flight plan to take advantage of the jet stream or wind patterns during that day to try and reduce flight time and fuel consumption. The key difference here is that Air India is saving more than two hours. Typically, you will see carriers saving a few minutes at a time from these interventions, this is a large change in routing with a large impact.”

At present, many of the routes from Asia to the Western US such as Seoul-Los Angeles or Tokyo-Dallas do not take a polar route so as to catch the jet stream.

Also within the US, most east to west routes, such as Los Angeles to New York or Seattle to Boston adjust their routing a little so that they can catch the jet stream and get the tailwind. But this effect is typically a few hundred miles, the experts said.

“ None of the Indian airlines or the airlines flying out of India use the North Pacific Ocean route. ” says Vishal Mehra, a Delhi-based aviation industry expert.

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