We use five years of Geotail and AMPTE/IRM measurements in the near-Earth magnetotail to compute angles between vectors of fast earthward plasma flow and the local magnetic field. In the low-&bgr; parts of the magnetotail, fast flows were found to be nearly field-aligned with an average angle of ~20¿. In the high-&bgr; plasma sheet the average angle was larger than 45¿. 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. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union