That's like saying the "effective speed" of a 777 is 45 mph because that's the maximum average speed over a month accounting for refueling and servicing. Or that the "effective battery life" of a MacBook Pro is 70 minutes because that's how long you can run it at full tilt. It completely ignores the typical customer use case.
I feel nerdsniped! The utilization rate of a major airline 777 is ~12 hours per day. If the ORD-LAS flight I took today is representative, average in-transit speed is 331mph, so the average speed of a jetliner isn't 45mph, but rather... 165mph?
Hmm, I think that figure could be off by a decent amount though depending on what exactly is measured by "utilization". Taxiing, for example, or sitting at the gate with an hour delay.
I think the best way to figure this out is to conduct a little study: set up a script to monitor a representative sample of planes on FlightAware for a while.
Taxiing is included in utilization time, but also in my average transit time (I just took the nautical distance traveled and divided it by the actual transit time).
