The company United Airlines announces the return of supersonic flights for 2029, but an Atlanta start-up is doing better: it is testing the hypersonic plane, capable of making its passengers travel at five times the speed of sound. A project that seems to cheapen the climate crisis.
To cross the Atlantic, the Concorde needed three hours. The hypersonic plane will make the same trip in ninety minutes – at least if the plans of the American start-up Hermeus come to fruition, reports the site of CNN.
For now, the Atlanta start-up, which has among its founders former employees of SpaceX, the space group of Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, the company of Jeff Bezos, is testing a new type of engine. on behalf of the US Air Force: it involves propelling a small unmanned aircraft at more than 4,800 km / hour. But an even more ambitious – or crazier – project is already under study: to design an aircraft capable of ensuring transatlantic commercial flights at the same speed.
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To understand how daring the idea of an airliner capable of flying at Mach 5 is, one only has to look at previous flight speed records, writes CNN. In 2004, the fastest aircraft ever designed, the X-43A built by NASA, flew for a few seconds at Mach 9.6, or more than 10,000 km / hour. The record for the longest flight over Mach 5 is currently held by the Boeing X-51, an experimental aircraft which in 2013 flew 426 km in six minutes. These two devices were unmanned vehicles, unlike the X-15A-2 rocket plane which in 1967 had reached a speed of 7,272.68 km / hour 1967 with a human on board.
Many challenges remain to be overcome
The engine on which Hermeus board should combine two well-known technologies: a turbojet, similar to the one used in aircraft of
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