Hour-long flights from London to New York could happen within eight years
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Loading... - CRISTIAN CASTILLO
- 03 Jun 2020
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Fancy a quick daytrip to New York? Well that might sound a bit far fetched, what with the eight-hour flight time, but it could actually become a reality.
The U.S. Air Force is planning on building a hypersonic air vehicle based on the X-51 Waverider which successfully flew at Mach 5.1 (3,882 mph) 60,000 ft over the Pacific two years ago.
Mica Endsley, chief scientist, said they had been working with the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, to bring the plane into action by 2023.
She told military.com: ‘X-51 was really a proof of concept test. It showed that you could get a scram jet engine, launch it off an aircraft and it could go hypersonic.
‘It was able to go more than Mach 5 until it ran out of fuel. It was a very successful test of an airborne hypersonic weapons system.’
Before you get too excited about nipping to Central Park for a quick jog, the technology is currently only being developed for defence purposes.
They hope to use the technology for missile systems testing by 2020. Ryan Helback, an official at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said: ‘We are the Air Force. What do we want to do with this technology? We want to weaponise it.’
