Engineers develop hypersonic plane that can get to Australia in 5 hours
For those of us that hate flying, the prospect of Australia is dismal. All that time on a plane ? Are you mad ?
Well, worry not. Trusty engineers are ready to give hope to those of us who feel positively ill when the plane takes off ; not to mention the people who say, “I told you so” anytime a plane crashes.
The Hypersonic plane is a concept from British engineers and designers from Reaction Engines in cooperation with the European Space Agency. The idea of the plane is to be able to transport passengers at 4,000 miles per hour (nearly 5 times the speed of sound).
Having said that it seems awfully fast. As a nervous flier, I think I’d prefer to stick out the long haul flight than get on a plane that’s going to haul ass.
The A2 Jet would be about twice the size of the biggest jets you get nowadays and could fly for about 12,500 miles.
Before the environmentalists go, well, mental, instead of guzzling fuel, the plane runs on ecologically friendlier liquid hydrogen, which emits water and nitrous oxide instead of carbon emissions.
The lack of windows might trouble some passengers but designers have promised to chuck in a few flat screen tellies to give the impression of windows. The reason for the windowless jet is because apparently, travelling at such speed, heat can be quite a problem when it comes to portholes. Who knew ?
Alan Bond, a senior engineer and managing director at Reaction Engines say it could be up and running in 25 years time if there’s a demand for it.
It’ll be interesting to see if there is actually demand for it after what happened to Concorde.
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I may be missing something, but how is 4,000 miles per hour nearly 5 times the speed of light?
I think they meant to say the speed of sound but I still chuckled when I read it for the first time.
Unfortunately Concorde was killed by British Airways after 1 small problem - there was still plenty of demand for it. Since they didn't want any luxury competition they refused to let Virgin buy the stock of planes when they were offered £1m each for them. Sometimes I think people have something against Richard Branson - which is a tad unfair when he is trying to keep such an icon as Concorde alive.
No, it's definitely 5x the speed of light - the part of the story that's wrong is the 5 hours bit. You get there 5 hours before you actually left...
whoops so sorry! must be half asleep!
haha still laughing at that. Ugh, how embarrassing.
there are still a few spelling mistakes.... for instance in the title? im not sure hypersonice is a word, and also "I think I’d prefer to stick out the long haul flight that get on a plane that’s going to haul ass."
there's a fairly common one in there...