Are earthward bursty bulk flows convective or field-aligned?

We use five years of Geotail and AMPTE/IRM measurements in the near-Earth m agnetotail to compute angles between vectors of fast earthward plasma flow and the local magnetic field. In the low-beta parts of the magnetotail, fas t flows were found to be nearly field-aligned with an average angle of simi lar to 20 degrees. In the high-beta plasma sheet the average angle was larg er than 45 degrees. The existence of a substantial convective component in the plasma sheet confirms the importance of the bursty bulk flow phenomenon for the magnetotail convection process.