A British team has designed a hypersonic passenger aeroplane that could one day fly passengers between Europe and Australia in less than five hours. (Sky News Tuesday 5th February 2008)The A2 was designed by Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines and would carry 300 passengers at a top speed of almost 4,000mph.
The company says the aircraft could be operating within 25 years and ticket prices would be comparable with an existing business class ticket, currently about £3,500.
The LAPCAT (Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies) project is being funded by the European Space Agency.
The ESA wants to encourage companies to push the boundaries of commercial air travel using technology more commonly associated with space travel.
Reaction Engines says the A2 is capable of sustained travel at Mach 5 - or 3,800mph - which is more than twice the speed of Concorde.
At 143-metres long, it is roughly twice the size of the biggest current jumbo jets.
It runs on a liquid hydrogen Scimitar engine still being developed that is based on existing technology.The ESA's website says hypersonic flight is generally considered to begin at Mach 5. This is when aerodynamic heating becomes important in aircraft design, with temperatures in the boundary layer and on the surface of an object reaching 1,000C.
Hypersonic flight is not new. The first man-made object to reach hypersonic speeds was the two-stage US "Bumper" rocket, assembled from a captured German V-2 rocket in 1949.
