Why is the flight abroad longer than the way back to Israel?

Hello, this is the captain; Many Israelis are currently in the midst of preparing for the Passover vacation wave, and are looking for the perfect flight – as cheap and fast as possible. Freedom is both sweet and short, and every minute at the destination is important. But have you ever noticed that the flights to Europe and the United States are almost always longer than the flights back to Israel?

For the previous “Captain” series:

It doesn’t matter if you fly to break the casino in Varna, see Liverpool-Arsenal in Anfield in early April, relax on the beach in Corfu or visit the uncle in America – the flight abroad will take longer than the flight back to Petah Tikva.

The numbers don’t lie: those who take a direct flight from Tel Aviv to Heathrow will fly five hours and twenty-five minutes on the way to their destination – and four hours and fifty minutes back to Israel. Flying to New York? Tel Aviv to JFK is 11 hours, fifty subtlety. Are you coming back? Ten and a half hours.

Paris? Five hours out, forty-four return. Vienna? Three fifty, versus three twenty five. This also applies to nearby destinations: a direct flight to Athens takes an average of two and a quarter hours, and a return to Israel – two hours. Larnaca? One hour there, fifty minutes back.

At first thought, it sounds logical: after all, there is a lot of movement in the air from here to America, and many things that affect the duration of the flight. The first variable is the route: an airline that operates a higher flight, where it is easy to cruise quickly, will be able to reach the destination faster.

Not every company accepts the most convenient routes, and you won’t always get them for every leg of the flight. The route itself is affected by the density of the country’s skies, the costs of using it and also international politics; Ask anyone who used to fly over Ukraine on his way from Europe to the Far East, and now has to detour so as not to accidentally grab a bite from some Sukhoi.

The next factor is the weather. Its influence is enormous: storm clouds have to be bypassed, so that the flight does not turn into a vomit carnival – which will inevitably make the journey longer. In addition, when the air is too hot around the target, its density decreases and it is difficult to slow down and lower. Therefore, the lowering process will start earlier and will affect the entire flight.

Another factor is the plane itself; A Boeing 777 cruises at a speed of 850 to 890 km/h, while an Airbus A330 cruises at 870 km/h. The differences are small, but manifest in a gap of tens of minutes on long flights.

The flight can be very long also because of the situation at the airport: sometimes there are ground delays, safety incidents and not on us – also emergency situations. It could be a wheel that didn’t open all the way or a passenger who had a seizure, and these will always affect the environment. And when such things are coded, the crew will be asked to pause, slow down or circle in the air until the problems are solved.

And as you move away from Europe towards Israel, you see less air traffic; After all, there aren’t many airports in the middle of the Mediterranean, and North Africa is less attractive to tourists than Northern Italy, for example. When the airspace is less crowded, the likelihood of accidents and malfunctions is lower; and even when something does happen, fewer flights in the vicinity will be affected.

But see it’s a miracle: let’s take a completely fictional situation where all the pilots from pole to pole go on a pampering vacation in Bora-Bora, except for the crew on your plane. And let’s just say that the flight is perfect and wonderful, without any delay or glitch, and all the way the sun just smiles at you from the window.

Even if you are the only ones sailing in the skies of this planet, and you are now flying to New York and back to Israel on exactly the same route – the flight home will be shorter than the flight to the destination. How is that possible?

The flights last longer because of the movement of the air currents at cruising altitude, especially the jet streams.

These are four currents that move eastward in two polar belts (closer to the poles) and two subtropical (closer to the equator), at a height of 25,000 to 50,000 feet and their speed ranges from 140 to 400 km/h.

The jet stream was originally discovered in 1920 by the Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi. Experiments he conducted with balloons near Mount Fuji proved: there is a tremendous air movement, in a fairly constant direction, and it can be used for the benefit of humanity.

The early 1920s were a time of optimism, technological innovation and a new air flow that could help inland sailing really caught the spirit of the times. The researcher was very happy and decided that this was something the whole world must know; How will he tell everyone? Publish the detailed study published in Esperanto – an international language. He was one of the greatest promoters of Esperanto in Japan, and saw it as a perfect way to bring peoples and cultures together.

But Japan was still a very isolated society in those days, and the happy Oishi did not know that outside of a very small community, no one used this language or was interested in learning it; Esperanto was officially established only 15 years before. It was kind of like launching this column in Klingon.

It was estimated that he published his research, among other things, to promote exposure to Esperanto among the scientific community. But science already had a language that no one liked – Latin, and scientists preferred to read studies in English, French and German. And so his sensational discovery remained very, very quiet for twenty years.

The world was exposed to the existence of the jet stream only in the early 1940s, when the USA sent masses of heavy bombers to Britain – from where they set out to destroy the Nazi infrastructure in occupied Europe. The planes were filled with fuel tanks and sent flying across the ocean; the North Atlantic route went from Canada to Greenland and Iceland to the United Kingdom .

En route to Britannia, the crews realized that their B17s were flying faster than expected, relative to the throttle position. It doesn’t make sense for it to be 60% open, and the plane will cruise at full speed. This happened because they caught an eastward jet stream.

Later, bomber crews flying the mid-Atlantic route – from Florida to Bermuda and England through the Azores – reported that they did not always get help from the wind. Over time it became clear that the effect of the jet streams changes from season to season, because the streams themselves move, depending on the temperature of the air around them.

For example, in winter they are closer to the equator in our area, and their intensity is greater. In the spring and summer, warming pushes them north. It is the jet streams that affect your plane on the way to Europe and the USA, and their effect is expressed as a nose wind and a tail wind.

The captain had a Sikorsky passenger plane engine malfunction

A tailwind is an air movement that gives your plane a little help – a push from behind, which allows you to maintain cruising speed while using less power. And wind is the opposite: air movement that creates a lot of resistance, prevents the plane from moving forward, and forces the crew to use much more power to sail at the same speed.

And what exactly is power? fuel; The pilots open the throttle, the engine roars and burns more than it should, and your Boeing 777 will cruise at 850 km/h instead of 750. You in the cockpit will continue to watch an action movie from the nineties or a random episode of “Frasier” and you’ll arrive on time. But the airline will just take all the guesswork out of it. Out of anger; both of herself, and of the pilots.

Fuel is-is the biggest expense of any airline, and has recently become more expensive at a rate that overtakes the rate of oil price increases. According to IATA data – the International Airline Association, last year a kg of A1 jet fuel cost about $0.82.

Since then the price has soared like a rocket, among other things due to the slow recovery of the oil sector from the drop in demand during the Corona period, and from the sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. An airline that does not manage to reduce fuel use, simply will not survive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at the press conference in Kazakhstan

So in the field, flights that pass too close to a frontal jet stream will simply cruise lower. Although it is not easy to sail fast at an altitude where the air is less thin without exerting more power, you also do not get a wind of hundreds of kilometers per hour in your face.

Aviation is a business with tiny profit margins, and the companies know very well that passengers prefer to fly cheap than to fly fast. And so a situation arose in which the flight to the west is slower than the flight to the east, especially over central Europe and the Atlantic Ocean – on the way to the destinations we like the most. What could change the situation? Will the winner fly more slowly on vacation?

Not necessarily. All that is needed is a huge leap forward in engine technologies, fuel materials, or human knowledge in the field of aerodynamics. Powerful and very efficient engines will be able to significantly reduce the cost of cruising and thus allow the airlines to accelerate even against headwinds. New fuels that will be cheaper to produce will reduce costs and allow fast cruising even without a new generation of engines. And aerodynamic tricks will be able to significantly optimize the flight even without reinventing the engine or its fuel.

For example, one of the factors that helped to deal with the fuel crisis of the seventies was The beginning of using Winglet – A fin that was installed at the end of the wings of a passenger plane and made it possible to deflect turbulence and thus improve fuel consumption by about 5%. In any case, until the shiny ones shine, we will continue to fly west and abroad on longer flights than back to Israel.

When will this revolution come? Not before the next decade. These days, Boeing is working on the development of a new type of wing, which will take off for the first test in the region of 2028, on top of a prototype of an unprecedentedly efficient plane – we will talk about it another time. And what will we do until then?

If it is important for you to get to your destination quickly, my tip is to prefer flights as early as possible; The delays in the field and in the air usually start around eight in the morning, and peak at six in the evening. Early flights include less traffic in the air and therefore less traffic, the airport is less busy and everything flows more smoothly, and often the ticket is also a little cheaper. Have a nice flight!

Why is the flight abroad longer than the way back to Israel?

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