Why is a flight in an east direction much shorter than a flight west?

Question

Why is a flight in an east direction much shorter than a flight west?

Answer 1

Because generally the wind blows East.

If an airplane's engines are capable of making it fly 400mph, relative to the surrounding air, but the air is moving at 40mph, then if the airplane is flying East it is going 440mph relative to the ground, but if it's flying West it is going 360mph relative to the ground.

Also, the times printed on your ticket will be "shorter" for an Eastbound flight if you're crossing time zones, since the departure and arrival times are printed in the local time zones of those cities.  But that obviously doesn't affect the amount of time you're in the plane.

Answer 2

normally, (especially between europe and north america) the flight path is a sort of one-way system, and it is circular, if you fly for example from london to mexico city, you will fly north over scotland then over iceland, north canada then right down the US and into mexico, and on the way back you will fly as north as florida then straight across the ocean to london!!

Answer 3

It isn't always, but yes flying across, say, the USA it generally is because of which way the wind is blowing.

Answer 4

The wind issue affects very slightly the flight duration. I guess you're not basing your question on local times...

Airlines schedule departure and arrival times in local times. So if you compute the duration using local times you're doing your math bad.

The local time of a time zone is "earlier" than the eastern adjacent time zone, and "later" than the western adjacent time zone. This is because when the sun is on top on a time zone it's on the skyline of another time zone which is on the west and so on.

If you translate departure and arrival times to a given time zone you will find that the time it takes to go one way is almost the same time it takes to return.

Sorry if you didn't mean that.