Boeing 747 vs. SR-71 Blackbird vs. New Horizons Deep-Space Probe
By on Sep 01 2015
Commercial airliners are fast. A Boeing 747 can hit speeds of up to 550 mph. Spy jets like an SR-71 Blackbird are even faster. They can travel at over three times the speed of sound, somewhere around 2,700 mph. But how does something like the New Horizons deep-space probe compare?
Believe it or not, the probe that just flew past Pluto can travel a whopping 65x faster than a Boeing 747, speeding across the solar system at 36,000 mph. To put this into perspective, you can travel from New York City to San Francisco in approximately five minutes, and around the world in under an hour.
The animation below, created by Google employee Clay Bavor, demonstrates the differences in speed if you were looking out the window of each aircraft/spacecraft. Pretty interesting to look at if you ask us.
