Highest speed

Speed is relative. Mach 1.01 at 42K ft? Boring! 120KIAS at 4ft? fun! 300KIAS at 300ft? Fun!

Exactly! The most exciting sense of speed I've ever had was on one of those shifter go-karts, doing maybe 60-70mph. Certainly more exciting than droning on at .xx mach in the flight levels.
 
With a slight rate of descent, I can get my little Sonerai up to 160mph IAS. If the air is anything but glass smooth, it feels like bouncing down a dirt road in an old buckboard with 2 nags running hell bent for leather. I routinely see ground speed in excess of 130mph at 65% cruise. And, thats all with a 60hp VW engine sipping about 3gph.
 
Lessee....
All units in mph unless noted.
I ran the 40 in under 4.5 (so a little over 20 at some point)
Cracked 60 downhill on a bike - if the speedo was accurate - can't verify
157 on both the bike and in the car (separate instances) - oops forgot the time I drove a stock car at MIS. Don't think I hit 200. I think it avg'd to about 180ish I think
215kts straight and level one night from here to KLOM after I made the turn at TOL
 
Does your radar provide GS of another aircraft in 4 digits?
I don't know if I've ever locked someone up going more than 1,000 KTAS - it displays TAS of the target but also gives us a Mach cue for anything over M1.1 - typically when I see the Mach cue I'm not looking at the TAS of the target because things are about to get busy! :)
 
Flew a de Havilland Beaver backwords along the Turnagain Arm just south of Anchorage. Winds were a little over 50knots and I just dropped some flaps and started backing up. People along the highway were stopping and watching.

Had a ground speed of 176 knots in a helicopter flying low level over Vancouver Canada. The clouds were low and kept us just above the rooftops. That was fun. ATC was impressed.
 
More important stat is kts per dollar input into the system.
That is what limits us most from achieving a higher vmax.
And the highest kts/$ wins!
(if you don't own the a/c or pay the expenses, you must include current market values!)

On that criteria I think the soap box derby racer I had when I was a kid would have won, hands down. I think the only thing my Dad paid money for on it was the 4 wheels. :D
 
Mach 1.3 or so on the Concorde, from JFK to Heathrow. They politely denied my request to right-seat it for 30 seconds so I could log time... :D

Those tiny windows in the passenger cabin (a little bigger than a paperback novel) get pretty hot from the surface friction.

I hit about 180 kts ground speed in the RV-9A en route to Phoenix from SoCal, with a decent tailwind.
 
RV-7A with 30 knot tail wind and 190 knot ground speed (160 KTAS) on 8.2 GPH @ 10.5k'.

190k = 218.7 MPH
 
Fastest in level cruising flight in my airplane (180 hp C-172N) was yesterday, 161 knots groundspeed in a nice smooth tailwind at 9,500':

KLN90B.jpg

Speed is relative. Mach 1.01 at 42K ft? Boring! 120KIAS at 4ft? fun! 300KIAS at 300ft? Fun!

Flying low and slow you get the same sensation of speed as flying high and fast ... only the cows are bigger.

:p
 
not sure exactly but have flown in the Miss America p51
And a L39 jet
 
215kmh on the Autobahn. I would go faster but my car starts losing downforce and I don’t feel like dying just yet.

My Archer ain’t going to go much more than 120 kts indicated. Best ground speed I saw was 165 with a nice tailwind.

The fastest GA plane I have been in, not piloting, was @Radar Contact ’s 310.
 
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