Extreme tailwinds helped 3 planes break records flying from New York to London in under five hours

VS4 is the airline's 6:30 p.m. service from New York to London.

The aircraft was another Airbus A350-1000 XWB and was the second A350 to enter Virgin's fleet when it was delivered in August 2019, according to planespotters.net.

Like most of its A350 colleagues, the aircraft has been faithfully flying between London and New York since September when the aircraft was inducted into passenger service.

The plane had a top ground speed of over 800 miles per hour. The UK flag carrier beat out Virgin Atlantic, both its next nearest competitor in terms of speed on Saturday night and in business, by one minute.

British Airways, however, may have an advantage over its Virgin Atlantic competitor in the form of an additional engine on each wing. BA112, the airline's 6:30 p.m. service to London, was operated by the airline's iconic Boeing 747-400 aircraft, affectionately known as the Queen of the Skies, which has four engines.

Virgin Atlantic responded on Twitter to being bested by British Airways' Jumbo Jet, saying: "It's true that we were narrowly beaten by a BA Boeing 747, however, they had twice the amount of engines and burnt twice as much fuel as Captain Chris in our brand new, fuel-efficient Airbus A350-1000."

The UK flag carrier is not new to setting records on the route, as the airline was an operator of the famed supersonic Concorde. During its tenure, British Airways set the record for the New York-London flight with the Concorde in 1996 at two hours and 52 minutes, which is unlikely to be broken anytime soon no matter how strong the winds of the Atlantic are.

The aircraft operating the flight, registration G-CIVP, was delivered to British Airways in February 1998, according to planespotters.net, two years after the Concorde set the record on the route. British Airways is the sole operator of the Boeing 747 on the London-New York route, with most airlines operating smaller twin-engine aircraft such as the Boeing 777, Boeing 767, Airbus A330, and Airbus A350.

London's Heathrow Airport, where the three aircraft landed after their record journey times, was among the worst affected by the storm, The Independent reported. Close to 300 flights were affected at Britain's busiest airport, with flights either delayed, canceled, or diverted to the impacts of the weather.

Some flights departed from their origin airports only to get to the UK and have to turn around and return to where they came. A Scandinavian Airlines flight from Oslo to Manchester, UK reached its destination only to find itself unable to land and had to return to Oslo, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Transcontinental flights are frequently served by tailwinds that reduce their flight times in the eastbound direction. They allow flights from West Coast cities to New York to be accomplished in less than five hours.

For every strong tailwind, however, there is an equally strong headwind that makes flights in the opposite direction longer. To avoid the strong winds, transatlantic flight paths were moved to the north.

Flyers heading from east to west could expect longer than normal flight times in the US on routes such as New York to Los Angeles. While normally flying from the Big Apple to the City of Angeles takes around five hours and 30 minutes, some flights on Sunday such as American Airlines flight AA171 and JetBlue Airways flight B6123 were taking an excess of six hours to fly from coast to coast and flying as far north as Minneapolis to do so.