An aircraft concept capable of traveling up to 10 times the speed of sound and five times faster than the Concorde could theoretically take passengers across the Atlantic Ocean in a mere 30 minutes, according to online reports.
Designed by Canadian engineer Charles Bombardier, the Skreemr jet could carry as many as 75 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 10, or more than 7,600 mph, Fox News and the Toronto Globe and Mail said. The scramjet would be launched at high velocity with the aid of a magnetic railgun launching system, and then its main engine would be ignited with the help of rockets.
Limitations to existing scramjet technology prevent the aircraft from being feasible at this point, but it shows how using a maglev-style space launch system and conventional rockets could help accelerate the aircraft initially, helping it to reach March 4. After its scramjet engine ignites, the plane would burn hydrogen and compressed oxygen to continue its acceleration.
Sadly, don’t expect to hop on the Skreemr any time soon
In the Globe and Mail, Bombardier explained that the system “would need to be long enough to achieve supersonic speed without taxing the passengers with too much g-force,” and that it might be possible “to skip the rocket part” if the aircraft was made from materials that could withstand the heat and pressure—and if the aircraft’s occupants could sustain the acceleration.
Renderings of the proposed aircraft were created by designer Ray Mattison from Design Eye-Q in Duluth, Minnesota. Sadly, while the kind of scramjet technology described by Bombardier is currently being tested by the military, Bombardier admits it’s unlikely that it will be usable by civilian aircraft anytime in the foreseeable future.
“Scramjet engine designs are being developed right now by the US and China. It will take years to see them on factory-built military drones, but maybe in the distant future they could be used to fly passengers across oceans at very high speed,” he wrote in the Globe and Mail, adding that the concept was designed as a way to “ignite your imagination around this idea.”
On the plus side, even though the Skreemr jet might not happen in any of our lifetimes, patents filed by Airbus a few months ago describe a jet capable of making the New York-to-London run in only an hour, and reports indicate that said aircraft is actually in development at this moment. For the sake of comparison, it took the Mach 2 Concorde 3.5 hours to make the journey.
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Feature Image: Charles Bombardier
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