Crazy headwinds and odd question.
 

Today's LAX-HKG flight was an interesting experience, thought i'd share. Nothing bad really, it was your run of the mill flight.

Had three family members and business associates on 4 different flights.

Me: CX881
Dad: CX883
Mom: CI (SFO-TPE)
Associates: br (LAX-TPE)

Dad's CX883 took off ontime at LAX, but at checkin they informed that a fuel stop was needed in TPE. So it arrived in HKG about 3.5 hrs late. No big deal, because the connecting flight is at 12:30pm.

My CX881 departed on time, and landed 1.5 hrs late... massive headwinds, i remember seeing the ground speed at 500mph. My connection to TPE was missed/cancelled because the plane landed late. No biggie because the HKG/TPE route occurs literally hourly :)

Mom/Associates flights was also more than 1hr late, taking off on time.

So I'm wondering. Why does CX883 need to have a fuel stop, and not 881? Do the 747's have different fuel tank configurations or did the other plane have more freight to carry?

And... Routing was kind of intriguing. Land was always within stone's throw from the plane. Took off at LAX, hugged the coast, right over SFO, Oregon, wa, over YVR, Anchorage, parts of soviet union, flew towards north korea(the funny part, veered south right before dprk), then between south korea/japan, right over TPE, and into HKG.

Apparently several early morning onward connection (so i was told) was cancelled because all of the arrivals into HKG was late.

that's a more northern routing than my NRT-DTW flight on monday -- we flew across the pacific from narita, barely reached the aleutians, then crossed the USA coast at seattle, continuing east to detroit. we had a steady 100+ mph tailwind across the pacific. we crossed seattle about 7.5 hours out of narita.

winds were crazy last week on a NRT-HKG roundtrip, as well -- the CX airshow indicated headwinds in excess of 200mph for the first hour and a half of the outbound flight, and in-flight time NRT-HKG was 5 hours, 25 minutes. at times, our ground speed was in the 300's MPH. the return was 3 hours, 25 minutes.

A westbound flight (like LAX-HKG) would look to avoid headwinds as much as possible while an eastbound flight (like NRT-DTW) would look to catch tailwinds as much as possible. It sounds like there were strong winds over the mid-Pacific and, as such, westbouinds flights were routing north to avoid them and eastbound flights were going straight across.

On all my U.S.-Japan/China flights, we always route quite far north westbound and fly pretty-much straight across the Pacific eastbound.

Rumour has it that the CX883 has "priority" for a fuel stop since it is an earlier flight and most people can still make their connections should there be a need for a fuel stop. CX881 doesn't normally need a fuel stop as CX deliberately loads all the cargo onto CX883 in order to try to avoid CX881 requiring a stop. I don't believe this procedure has been confirmed by anyone, but you can see that almost always 883 is the flight that gets delayed.

This is also why CX needs the 777s on the LAX route as they can make the route in Winter with a full load and no fuel stop.