Australia and New Zealand using tailwind question

[Andy Rylance]

An interesting question came up recently which I could not answer.

If you are flying from London to Australia and New Zealand which is the way round to go if you wanted to use as much tail wind as possible and had no restrictions as to your routing? - my amateur guess is that the routing London - Hong Kong - Sydney - Auckland - Los Angeles - London would probably be the route that would have more tail winds than any other routing over an average and that reversing the route London - Los Angeles - Auckland - Sydney - Hong Kong - London would be the most headwinds over average?

I hand over to pilots flying those routes to describe the usual winds found on those routes..

Thanks in advance.

Andy

[DeeJayEss]

A lot of work might need to go into this answer, but I can certainly vouch for the Australia - NZ part of it. West to East is certainly the best option. The jet above FL310 is usually in excess of 120-150kts, obviously differing with seasonal variation.

Can't recall ever seeing a decent tailwind the other way, the physcis doesn't really support it...

Dunno if this helps or not, it's only a small leg considering. :ok:

[bfisk]

Well, upper easterlies are not that uncommon at lower latitudes around Asia during summer/autumn because of the relative heat of the landmass and the relative coolness of the ocean, which causes the thermal wind to reverse from what we usually see (ie the colder air closer to the equator). This may in some cases result in a easterly jet.

[DeeJayEss]

bfisk:

Yeah, I know. Going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that it is helped by a little bit of physics as well once you get North of Australia. But I don't think Andy wants to go into a discussion about Hadley Cells and why you get some easterly and some westerly jets depending on what latitude band you're in at the time. :ugh: In fact, who would??? :confused:

I was only trying to emphasise that the route Australia to NZ in lieu of the reverse will (almost) always be better.

Sorry for the hijack Andy, thread may be going a little off topic.

DJS.