Airline Knot Pitot Tube 
Pilot Institute
JULY 11, 2025
Since it’s a ratio, it doesn’t matter if you measure speed in knots, miles per hour, or meters per second. At sea level on a standard day (15 °C or 59 °F), sound travels about 661 knots (approximately 761 mph or 1,225 km/h). Here, Mach 1 is roughly 573 knots (about 659 mph). The Mach value stays the same.
Air Facts
MAY 5, 2025
The general prognosis indicated no icing in the clouds, no turbulence and a quartering headwind from the west resulting in a mere five knots of headwind component. Instead of a gentle breeze out of the west, we had over 20 knots of headwind blowing out of the south. Obviously, the winds aloft were nowhere near forecast.
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Fear of Landing
MAY 9, 2025
The most recent case, when Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 experienced extreme turbulence in May 2024, led to thirty passengers injured and one death by a passenger who suffered a heart attack. Before that, the most recent turbulence-related passenger flight with a fatality in the NTSB database was United Airlines flight 826 in 1997.
Flying Magazine
JULY 11, 2025
I was inspired by Ernest Gantt’s seminal work, Fate Is the Hunter , which chronicles his adventures of flying the line when round-engined DC-2s, -3s, -4s, -6s, Boeing 307s, and Lockheed Constellations were the primary people movers during the golden age of airliners. Gantt would not have been impressed.
Pilot's Life Blog
APRIL 9, 2024
Moving air from outside feeds into the pitot tubes and fills a pressure diaphragm. The sensor detects the amount of force from the pitot impact pressure and gives it airspeed indications by converting those values into speed. Airline pilots also need to know airspeed so they can know when to engage the landing gear.
AeroSavvy
OCTOBER 26, 2020
Airlines are upgrading older cockpits with newer displays, so this old indicator will soon become a relic. Ram air from a pitot tube and static (undisturbed) outside air from a static port, usually a hole on the side of the fuselage. V MO on the 767 is between 340-360 knots (depending on aircraft serial number).
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