The temporal instability behavior of a viscoelastic liquid jet in the wind-induced regime with axisymmetric and asymmetric disturbances moving in an inviscid gaseous environment is investigated theoretically. The corresponding dispersion relation between the wave growth rate and the wavenumber is derived. The linear instability analysis shows that viscoelastic liquid jets are more unstable than their Newtonian counterparts, and less unstable than their inviscid counterparts, for both axisymmetric and asymmetric disturbances, respectively. The instability behavior of viscoelastic jets is influenced by the interaction of liquid viscosity and elasticity, in which the viscosity tends to dampen the instability, whereas the elasticity results in an enhancement of instability. Relatively, the effect of the ratio of deformation retardation to stress relaxation time on the instability of viscoelastic jets is weak. It is found that the liquid Weber number is a key measure that controls the viscoelastic jet instability behavior. At small Weber number, the axisymmetric disturbance dominates the instability of viscoelastic jets, i.e., the growth rate of an axisymmetric disturbance exceeds that of asymmetric disturbances. When the Weber number increases, both the growth rate and the instability range of disturbances increase drastically. The asymptotic analysis shows that at large Weber number, more asymmetric disturbance modes become unstable, and the growth rate of each asymmetric disturbance mode approaches that of the axisymmetric disturbance. Therefore, the asymmetric disturbances are more dangerous than that of axisymmetric disturbances for a viscoelastic jet at large Weber numbers. Similar to the liquid Weber number, the ratio of gas to liquid density is another key measure that affects the viscoelastic jet instability behavior substantially. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.