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I distinctly remember my CFI in flying school brow beating it into us rookie pilots that "what you lose in a headwind, you never regain in the tailwind on the way back", and explaining it to us long handed on the blackboard. Seems illogical, but the math stacked up as in your illustration above.


My standard way to think about stuff like that is to extrapolate to infinity: even if your tail wind were infinite and you’d arrive in 0 time, your way back would have infinite headwind and you’d never make it back.

Conclusion: increased wind increases the round trip time.


I know this principle quite well from... riding a bike. Wind resistance dominates as soon as you get above a casual riding speed.




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