Airbus are known for their giant airplanes, and it’s not hard to know why, as they’re used all over the world to transport people and materials. Their new design hopes to improve on that by allowing them to travel at speeds of up to four and a half times the speed of sound!
To summarise this, travelling to New York from London currently takes seven to eight hours, with the new airbus design the flight would take a single hour. Flights from Paris to San Fransico and Tokyo to Los Angeles would take a mere three hours, saving people and companies time which they often don’t have lying around (or sitting) in the air.
The airplane will be a little different from your normal flight. designed to take off vertically thanks to some engines mounted underneath the jet is designed to climb vertically until it’s almost at the speed of sound. After this, it relies on rocket motors to carry it up to 100,000 feet before finally allowing the ramjets to push it to a final speed of Mach 4.5.
The design is similar to a lot of high-speed military jets, and even has some resemblance to the concord, a jet which was not allowed to operate over land due to the worry that it would cause a sonic boom. The new crafts design is built to limit not only the noise it creates but also the sonic booms, thereby hoping to allow it to travel in more populated areas without the restrictions set on the concord.
With only twenty seats on each jet, the chances are the tickets will be highly priced and the onboard entertainment short. Who wants a meal with their flight anyway?
Thank you Tech Sport for the information and the image.
I’m no engineer, but that picture is all kinds of wrong. First, those engines look way too small to propel that jet at even normal speeds. Second, that doesn’t look like a lifting body, so I don’t think there is enough surface area on the wing for proper lift. Lastly, there’s no way the aerodynamics of that plane are going to reach Mach 1. Maybe, and a very slight maybe, it may go supersonic at 100000 feet, but I doubt it.
Picture’s only for reference for now, the final version is prolly gonna look massively different. As for mach speeds, there’s a huge rocket engine on the back and it’s designed to fly at pretty damn high altitudes where the air is pretty thin, equalling less resistance, and the ramjets become more efficient the faster they’re moving, up to about mach 3. Like everything on the internet I’d take it with a pinch of salt, but it could be viable.
I’m no engineer either, but aren’t the aerodynamics different for subsonic and supersonic speeds? And isn’t the delta wing better for supersonic flight as apposed to regular wings.
CONCORDE!!
Barnes Wallis, the brains behind the Dambusters raid and the bouncing bomb, designed this in the 50s…