How Fast? 660 Knots at Cruise

19 Oct 2025

Fast. Properly humming.

660 knots of groundspeed — that’s roughly 760 mph, or 12½ miles every minute, about a mile every five seconds. If that doesn’t make you pause, consider this: at that pace you’re covering nearly 370 yards every second. By the time you’ve read this paragraph, you’d be a mile and a half down the sky-road.

At that speed, things happen quickly.

So what do pilots do if something goes wrong?

You might be surprised to learn — not much, at least at first.

Why? Because we’re descended from apes, our primeval survival instincts don’t serve us well in complex, high-stakes environments. Fight, flee, or freeze — none of these is particularly useful in the flight deck. The most dangerous of the three is perhaps fight — the urge to do something, anything — which can easily make a bad situation worse.

As Neil Armstrong once said:

“There is nothing on the flight deck that can’t be made worse by a pilot.”

Pilots are trained to establish controlled flight, sit on their hands, and analyse the situation before acting. Doing so switches on our cognitive, human brain and suppresses those instinctive reactions — leading to far better outcomes.

The ability to take stock in a fast-moving, high-pressure environment is a powerful leadership trait. Effective leaders filter out the noise, remain calm, gather information, and make reasoned decisions. They act deliberately and communicate clearly.

The key to that ability is emotional control and workload management — creating time and space to think.

At Flightpath Mentoring we teach these same skills one-to-one, and see dramatic improvements in leadership effectiveness — whether you’re in the cockpit or any other walk of life.

If this resonates, get in touch — we’ll show you how.