Mach 5 Mph - Nearly two decades after Concorde was retired, interest in supersonic travel is growing rapidly, and several superfast aircraft are under development. Airlines seem interested: United has already decided to offer supersonic routes as early as 2029.
But what about hypersonic travel, which takes place at Mach 5 - five times the speed of sound - and more? It will be able to fly from New York to London within 90 minutes, compared to about three hours for Concorde and between six and seven hours for regular passenger jets.
Mach 5 Mph
Hermeus, an Atlanta-based startup that aims to develop hypersonic aircraft, thinks so. It has been testing a new type of engine that it says will be able to reach Mach 5 (more than 3,000 mph). The engine is designed for the small, unmanned hypersonic jet that Hermes is currently building for the US Air Force, but if scaled up to a larger size, it would be able to power passenger jets.
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The passenger plane is a long way off - Hermeus hopes to take to the air for the first test flight before the end of the decade in 2029 - but because its technology will have to be completely built from the ground up, the company is already planning it.
For starters, it will be much smaller than current airliners and even Concorde, which has a capacity of 100 passengers.
"To help us increase the size of the aircraft, we basically created a business model for the aircraft," said Hermeus CEO AJ Piplika. "We focused on business class and first travelers, and then played with some parameters like speed and service costs. What came out of that is a plane with a 20-passenger cabin," he added.
That's not far from the power of a large commercial airliner, which means it will be a class.
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"We hope it's profitable at today's business class prices," Piplika said, warning that it's hard to gauge how much people would be willing to pay to fly five times faster, because "you can't really answer that question." There is a product and it has real data."
The plane will have a range of about 4,000 nautical miles, enough for transatlantic routes like New York to Paris, but not transpacific routes like LA to Tokyo, which would require a stopover.
Routes on land, such as New York to LA, are not in question due to noise regulations: breaking the sound barrier comes with noise, which must be done on water.
To understand how conceptual a Mach 5 passenger plane is, it is useful to look at the plane's speed records.
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The fastest aircraft of any type is Mach 9.6 (about 6,800 mph), a record set in 2004 by the NASA X-43A - an unmanned aircraft about twelve feet long.
Because that flight only lasted a few minutes, the record for the longest flight above Mach 5 was held by the Boeing X-51, another experimental unmanned aircraft, which flew for more than three minutes at Mach 5.1 (about 3,400 mph) in 2013 Time flies by. . Both planes were to be launched from altitude by a B-52 bomber, and then accelerated by rockets, demonstrating the complexities of such high-speed aircraft.
For manned aircraft, the current specific speed record is Mach 6.7 (4,520 mph), set in 1967 by the X-15. It was a rocket base with a seat, designed to achieve the record and was supposed to be launched from a height by a B-52.
For air-breathing airplanes - that is, powered by jet engines rather than rockets - capable of taking off and landing on their own, the speed record is "only" Mach 3.3 (about 2,200 mph), established by is the SR-71 Blackbird, a military reconnaissance aircraft, in 1976.
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The top speed of Concorde, one of only two supersonic aircraft to fly commercially, was Mach 2.04 (1,350 mph).
The proposed Hermeus aircraft will, therefore, beat the current record for the fastest air-breathing aircraft by a large margin, and by flying for long periods at Mach 5, will surpass the current achievement in the field of test vehicles of no human (of course, other planes can break this record in the future) can win before Hermes does).
It is not surprising, then, that the main focus of the company is on the machine. Tests began in February 2020 for a new engine design based on the current model used in fighter jets and manufactured by General Electric.
It will be a hybrid of two traditional technologies: a turbojet, similar to what airplanes use, and a ramjet, a type of engine that only works at supersonic and higher speeds. Initially, the engine will power the Quarterhorse, an advanced hypersonic drone that Hermeus is developing through a $60 million partnership with the US Air Force.
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Interestingly, when designing an airplane to make it faster, parts are removed rather than added. In a turbojet, air enters from the front and is first compressed (to increase its power) by rotating blades, then mixed with fuel and light. The resulting hot gas is ejected from the rear of the engine propelling the aircraft forward.
Above Mach 3, however, there is no need to compress the air: it will compress itself as it enters the engine, just slowing it down a lot. Therefore, for speeds higher than Mach 3 and up to Mach 6, an engine called a ramjet is often used - so it literally flies through the air. Unlike turbojets, it has no propulsion units, but does not operate at speeds below Mach 3.
The Hermes will use its hybrid engines in turbojet mode during takeoff and landing as well as at subsonic speeds. Then, the engine will reset itself into ramjet mode as it reaches Mach 3 and Mach 5.
"The turbojet section and the ramjet section themselves are mature technologies that have been used for 50 years. The trick is to put them together, so we designed our own architecture around an off-the-shelf turbojet engine and then built it. From there," Piplika said.
Speed Of Sound To Miles Per Hour Conversion (sound To Mph)
There are many issues that Hermes is still not working on, such as the type of sustainable fuel to use - because the power will be much higher than the current planes - and the high temperatures that the hypersonic fuselage plane will have to withstand.
Concorde's speed, which traveled at less than half the estimated speed of Hermes, was limited precisely by temperature, with windows and other interior surfaces hot to the touch by the end of the flight.
The SR-71 Blackbird, on the other hand, must be made of titanium, a rare metal that can withstand extreme heat, and the cockpit is made of quartz glass, with outside temperatures reaching 600 F during a mission. .
In response to skepticism about the chances of Hermeus' success and the need for potentially large investments, Piplica drew comparisons with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
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"I think people asked the same questions about the space industry that were in the early days of SpaceX," he said. "People look at getting into orbit and say, this should cost a billion dollars, but SpaceX did it for $90 million with the Falcon 1."
Similar to SpaceX's development of Falcon 1, Dragon, Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets, Hermes plans to finance itself by developing several aircraft in the lines of its passenger planes, which bring the vision of interplanetary flight and generate income in tandem. . NASA and commercial partners.
"There's really nothing like Hermes, although many similar projects have come and gone in the past," said Teal Group shipping analyst Richard Aboulafia. "It doesn't seem to work. If they can create hypersonic cars in the 2030s, and the ticket price is in the commercial mode, then yes, it will be successful. But the probability of the event is somewhere around 1% .."
If and when a hypersonic passenger jet becomes a reality, what will it be like to fly on it?
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"It will be similar to Concorde," Piplica said. “You'll be jetlagged for a lot longer than you would on today's airplane, where you feel pushed back in your seat for about 30 seconds to a minute or so.
"The experience will last maybe 10 to 12 minutes. But once you get to Mach 5, 100,000 feet or so, it's a really smooth ride. There's not a lot of air traffic and the atmosphere is pretty rough. .”
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