List of birds by flight speed
This is a list of the fastest flying birds in the world. A bird's velocity is necessarily variable; a hunting bird will reach much greater speeds while diving to catch prey than when gliding. The bird with the greatest airspeed velocity is the Peregrine falcon, able to exceed 321.8 km/h (200 mph) in its hunting dives. The greatest self-powered horizontal speed is achieved by Homing Racing Pigeons. They can fly 1100 km (700 miles) in a single day, and they have been recorded flying at 177 km/h (110 miles per hour), making them the birds with the fastest speed ever recorded on a self-powered flight, and the fastest endurance flight.
Fastest propeller-driven aircraft
The more "traditional" class of propeller-driven aircraft are those powered by piston engines, which include nearly all aircraft from the Wright brothers up through World War II. Today piston engines are used almost exclusively on light, general aviation aircraft. The official speed record for a piston plane wass held by a modified Grumman F8F Bearcat, the "Rare Bear", with a speed of on 21 August 1989 at Las Vegas, New Mexico, United States of America. This record was retired as a new weight class based system was introduced to allow more pilots to set new records across a wider range of aircraft. On september 2, 2017, Steve Hinton Jr, in the modified P-51 Mustang "Voodoo" set the new record of in the C-1e class (the same weight class Rare Bear would fall into). This record is also the fastest for any propeller driven piston aircraft.