Originally Posted by
ahmetdouas
no no, it doesn't work like that. Indicated speed and ground speed are completely different. 745 MPH Ground speed with a 100 MPH tailwind is still 645 MPH indicated speed, so the air indicator would still show like Mach 0.85 or so in the cockpit, nothing near 0.99 MACH indicated! Anything above 0.86 or so MACH in a 777 and you would be getting overspeed warnings which really isn't a good thing, the plane would have to be checked over and the pilots in big trouble.
So it is physically impossible for any commercial jet in the air right now to come anywhere near the speed of sound in level flight no matter how strong the tail wind is, they would have to do a crazy dive.
Well, if a plane is travelling over the ground at 745 MPH, it is travelling at 745MPH, which 22 MPH short of SOS, which is pretty close in my book. The fact that 100MPH of that is coming from a tail wind and thus the indicator is showing substantially less, doesn't affect how quickly it is going from A to B.