Originally Posted by
bigwings8
Then I checked flightaware and saw that TPE-PEK flight flies at only 300 mph! Surprisingly, PEK-MEL flies at the normal 500 mph. Both routes are A330-300s.
I guess Air China doesn't think it's important to get people quickly from Taipei to Beijing (perhaps for fuel costs). I thought this was interesting, because on all of my United flights, I've never observed a jet plane (i.e. A320+ or 737+) fly at anything less than near cruising speed.
I believe you're looking at a filed speed on Flightaware which isn't indicative of the maximum cruising speed at all. I believe that is a projected average that factors in the much slower speeds of takeoff, climb, approach, etc. and possibly winds aloft, but haven't looked at the Flightaware info to know for sure where that particular figure comes from. But anyway, if you look at the graph of speed and altitude for a flight you'll see that the cruising speeds are much higher than that. Looking at graphs for a couple of the flights from the carrier and route you mentioned, it shows "normal" cruising speeds for the cruise portions of the flight. Other carriers flying that same route have similar flight times.