I don’t know much about planes or physics, maybe someone smarter can help.
In: 1
Yes.
Jet airliners travel at up to 600mph. The time on the ground (taxiing, takeoff, landing) and acceleration to cruising speed and altitude is more or less the same regardless of destination (barring changes related to the jet stream, airport runway layouts, traffic etc) so actual flight time is generally about one hour for 600 miles.
Remember that “flight time” runs from the moment the plane pulls out from the gate to when the plane pulls into the destination gate, and includes elements common to al flights like potentially needing to circle to wait for clearance to land. Those elements take about the same amount of total time whether the total flight distance is 5 miles or 5,000 miles.
If those elements take 45 minutes to complete, then your actual travel time becomes 1:15 WAS->SAV and 1:45 NYC->SAV, so the NY trip is about 40% longer than the Washington one, distance-wise.
Much of the time of a typical flight is the time it takes to ascend to cruising altitude and achieve top speed. So, you can’t just look at average speed from takeoff to landing, but you must consider the average speed once the plane hits top speed. It’s kind of like driving on some slow country roads, to reach the interstate. Once you reach the interstate, you’re traveling about a mile a minute, so you cover distance more quickly. So, let’s say you travel across 5 miles of country roads, then 5 miles of interstate, and it takes you 20 minutes to get to your destination. If you travel across the same 5 miles of country roads, but then you travel 15 miles on the interstate, then you have traveled twice the distance. But, it won’t take you twice as long to get there, because you spent more time traveling at higher speeds on the interstate.
And, of course, there are other factors to consider, such as wind currents, which vary from one area of the country to another–you fly faster moving with the wind than you do against it.
Consider that we’re measuring time based on pushback to docking. This is equal in time in *both* cases. Therefore in the long flight this non-flying logistical “overhead” is a smaller proportion of the flight, making point-to-point speed more efficient.
Same thing with the issue of acceleration and climb-to-altitude and deceleration prior to landing, the lower speed part of the flight. Both examples have the same lower speed “overhead” to achieve cruising altitude and velocity and to decelerate.
Combined, these standard logistic “overhead” issues give longer flights better average speeds, therefore better distance per time numbers.
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