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Virgin Atlantic's Flight 22 from Washington to London last Saturday achieved a peak speed of 802 mph over the ground and reached its destination 45 minutes early. An American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Doha on the same night reached 840 mph. Both speeds were substantially higher than that of sound at ground level (around 761 mph), but neither plane broke the sound barrier. To do that a jet has to be flying 761 mph faster than the air around it, not relative to the ground beneath. Both planes were instead being whipped along by an unusually fast jet stream sped up by the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which establishes a positive, non-linear causal link between warming air and its moisture content. One effect of the equation is that moist air gets moister, and a recent Nature Climate Change paper shows that it also indirectly makes fast segments of the jet stream go faster. Brace for short red-eyes.