Slashdot Mirror
Reaction Engines plan Mach 5 Airliner
What is? writes "A British company has designed an eco-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours. Reaction
Engines has received funding from the
European
Space Agency to design the plane as part of the
Long-Term
Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project. The
A2
airliner would be capable of carrying 300 passengers at speeds of up to Mach
5."
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I've seen more computer generated designs for supersonic passenger aircraft than I can count.
Is this going to be a real commercial jet, or just another cock tease?
You just cannot call it ECO friendly, if it deposits water vapor in the stratosphere. That is what is creating an ozone hole in the south pole larger than north america.
Lots of people have websites with cool drawings of fast planes. I scanned the material on their site and didn't see anything concerning a flux capacitor, so my cynicism is slightly abated.
Reporter: Toby Hunter, Minneapolis Star. No really, is this a joke?
Scientist: No, Toby, and no more questions about whether this is a joke.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I'd love to see how they can make an "eco-friendly" airliner that goes Mach 5. There are some really basic laws of aero and thermo dynamics that put the kibosh on most of these schemes. Look at the Concorde, XB-70, SR-71, for examples of how difficult and expensive it is to design, test, and operate anything going Mach 2 to Mach 3.3. And the problems just go up from there, often by squares and cubes.
Funny how they write about a Mach 5 airliner precisely when Slashdot crawls down to something like Mach 5e-55.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
..they're buying the old Concorde airframes and launching them from the US Navy's new railgun?
for a nice crater.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Does that include the monkey and toddler hiding in the trunk?
First, those look like low-bypass engines (yes, I know they are "normal" jet engines), which means very high exhaust velocities. The small wing also means high wing loading and high takeoff velocities. Those two facts seem to suggest a very loud plane which might run afoul of EU regs.
:(
Second, I can't help but think that fuel costs will kill this idea. GIven rising energy prices (and no large-scale miracle hydrogen factories on the horizon), the fuel costs will tend to track oil and nat gas prices. Even "free" wind/solar power won't help because a hydrogen factory would need to pay a competitive price for energy, which will be tied to the rising cost of fossil fuels and the rising global demand for energy.
That said, I'd love to fly in this thing even though the artists sketch shows a lack of windows due to heat issues
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
With a name like that, the plane better have little buzz saws that extend out of the front to cut down... er, really tall trees, I guess. And should take off with the help of extending stilts from the bottom. Plus a lot of other cool, but ultimately useless, gadgets.
Oh, and a chimpanzee and a little kid in the trunk.
Then again, maybe I should have RTFA.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The issues boiled down to two things that no amount of tech could alleviate: Noise issues (property owners near the airports got highly vocal about having to replace cracked windows from the occasional sonic booms), and price ($25k 1st class from NYC to Paris? And now you get to suffer the indignities of airport security too? Sounds like a masochist's dream come true...)
Unless/until they solve at least those two issues (in spite of public pronouncement, it doesn't look like they have IMHO - yet), they're going to have a hard time with it's initial public image, fuel economy be damned.
Sure the economics of volume may drop the price, and sure the noise problem can be solved through strict pilot discipline (e.g. no cracking the sound barrier until you're x miles away and at y altitude), but that won't change public perception that Concorde planted firmly in the public mind back during the 1970's).
OTOH, the tech is cool, and I can see a very solid use for it for trans-pacific passengers... Seattle to Tokyo in 3 hours instead of 12? Frickin' awesome...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Good, now we'll finally use those little barf-bags on the back of airline passenger seats.
A British company has designed an eco-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours.
How droll. Soon, you will be able to travel from London to Sydney in less time than it takes to negotiate security at the airport. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Why would this be a better option than a regular flight? Aside from being a relatively short trip, I'd still be stuck with 300 people and almost no chance at a window seat (does this thing even have windows, I can't tell.) What about the sonic boom, wasn't flying over populated areas and causing these kinds of noises a big problem for the Air France Supersonic Jet? Where are my Sky Cruisers, I'll take luxury and fine accommodations over speed any day; not every air traveler is a business traveler. But I suppose businesses want speedy and low cost flights, regardless of ones comfort. What things we put ourselves through for our businesses, Oh the humanity!
Demented But Determined.
The performance section of this is most interesting though: The designed thrust/weight ratio of SABRE ends up several times higher--up to 14, compared to about 5 for conventional jet engines, and just 2 for scramjets. This high performance is a combination of the cooled air being denser and hence requiring less compression, but more importantly, of the low air temperatures permitting lighter alloy to be used in much of the engine. Overall performance is much better than the RB545 engine or scramjets.
The engine gives good fuel efficiency peaking at about 2800 seconds within the atmosphere. Typical all-rocket systems are around 450 at best, and even "typical" nuclear powered engines only about 900 seconds.
The combination of high fuel efficiency and low mass engines means that a single stage to orbit approach for Skylon can be employed, with air breathing to mach 5.5+ at 26 km altitude, and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed.
Like the RB545, the pre-cooler idea adds mass and complexity to the system, normally the antithesis of rocket design. The pre-cooler is also the most aggressive and difficult part of the whole SABRE design. The mass of this heat exchanger is an order of magnitude better than has been achieved previously; however, experimental work has proved that this can be achieved. The experimental heat exchanger has achieved heat exchange of almost 1 GW/m^3, believed to be a world record. Small sections of a real pre-cooler now exist.
The losses from carrying around a number of engines that will be turned off for some portion of the flight would appear to be heavy, yet the gains in overall efficiency more than make up for this. These losses are greatly offset by the different flight plan. Conventional launch vehicles such as the Space Shuttle usually start a launch by spending around a minute climbing almost vertically at relatively low speeds; this is inefficient, but optimal for pure-rocket vehicles. In contrast, the SABRE engine permits a much slower, shallower climb, air breathing and using wings to support the vehicle, giving far lower fuel usage before lighting the rockets to do the orbital insertion. And there it is. That's why a vaporware tag might be applicable, this is still just a 'plan' and not actually in production right now. Still, it is massively safer to test prototypes of this than a scramjet or ramjet. That's one thing good going for it.
If they can pull off that precooler and heat exchanger, they're in business.
My work here is dung.
Should be ready in about 25 years, according to one article I read.
Don't cancel your travel plans just yet.
Did you know you can travel from London to Sydney on a bus, only takes about 4 months.
You can (essentially) only go supersonic over the oceans, so you need routes where you can actually use all that power, say New York to Europe or LA to the Pacific rim. Next, a ticket on this beast will cost slightly less than an average working stiff's annual mortgage payments. So we need to find 300 self-important assholes who are 1) richer than they are smart 2) in too big of a hurry to spend twice as much time crossing the ocean at 1/10th the price. And of course this model only works if there's regular service, never mind the fact that you only sold 4 tickets for Wednesday's LA to Shanghai run. There were how many planes in the Concorde fleet?? There is ZERO economic chance that this will ever happen.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
They'd be using Hydrogen as a fuel, which when burning is about as "green" as they come. Hydrogen generation aside (can use solar, hydroelectric, etc for green generation) you don't have to worry about eco impacts on it like you do with the fuel-guzzlin' Concorde. You could reduce the drag by pushing the thing up to near space altitudes, 100k+ feet altitudes or even higher.
that being said, to do a nonstop flight from sydney to london at that kind of speeds would require a new paradigm in aircraft design to be efficient and cost effective. My hunch is its certainly possible, but I'll do a "wait and see" til they do their ignaugural flight.
can it use existing runways? is it any noisier than existing airliners? does it use less fuel per passenger mile than existing airliners? The only thing that now makes me laugh about this project is that it would mean you spend far longer queueing to get through the security checks than you actually do in flight... If you want to improve travel times, start counting time spend checking in and the security checks and then work on getting those reduced...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Back when I had time to read it, I used to subscribe to popular mechanics. It seemed like pretty much every year another company was proposing newer, sexier, faster supersonic passenger transport. And this goes back to even when the concorde was still flying.
Now the concorde is de-commissioned, we're told never to fly again. If the concorde allegedly couldn't turn a profit, even at something like 10x the ticket price of regular air carriers for the same route, how will these new ones be able to do it?
And thats all regardless of public feelings towards sonic booms...
I sadly suspect these planes will someday compete with Duke Nukem Forever for vaporware lifetime achievement awards...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I notice the vapourware tag on this. On behalf of everyone in research, development, and design, I'd like to ask people to use it more carefully. I appreciate that in this blog age explicitly hypothetical products get discussed as though they're going to appear, and we've had our share of failed VC-funded frippery this decade, but that's no reason to suppose that a funded, well-organised, long-term development program is also a load of hot air. Remember the Optimus Keyboard? I particularly recall the dramatic shifting of gears from "made up nonsense" to "lolz logitech will do one for a buck twenty" on the part of gormless internet wags when it became clear that, hey, a company which has spent a few years showing off prototypes and sourcing parts is actually making the product. In this particular case, I'd like to point out that the announcement of an organised research effort is an indication that something is more likely to appear.
It looks like the plane Fireflash in one of the Thunderbird's shows. Okay, the engines are under the wings and not on the tail, but that's about it.
In order for their pretty web page even to be worth a glance, they are required to give some sort of answer to the sonic boom question. They don't need to answer the question "how can we fly at Mach 5 without creating a sonic boom," but they do need to answer the question "What about it?" An answer could be something like "We think public opinion has changed and people won't really mind," or "we're sure that unknown technological breakthroughs will occur to solve this problem before the plane flies," or "we don't think people will mind flying X hours subsonic in order to be over uninhabited areas before going supersonic, and we don't believe whales care," or whatever...
But they need to say something about it.
If they're not saying anything about it, it's just an SF magazine cover, not a serious proposal.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Popular Science wrote an article about this plane: Article
Concorde on steroids with more background links.
Tell me about it. I drive from Pittsburgh to East Hanover NJ every other week or so. Why not take the '1 hour' flight to Newark? Well...45 minutes to drive to the Airport, get there 2 hours early, fly for an hour, add some delays, get the baggage, rent a car, drive to East Hanover from Newark. Takes me over six hours really. It takes me 6 hours or so to drive it, it's all highway, and I am not a human sardine. I can also stop anywhere I want and leave at a flexible time come week's end for the drive home.
It wasn't always like that. Short hops like that pre 9/11 were far quicker if you just flew.
I found a photo of the plane's controls.
Looks like it has ample cargo space.
There is no chance that a mach 5+ aircraft would be in operation for consumer travel before there is a military version, otherwise the thing would be the biggest hijack target ever. Therefore, we can conclude that if this is seriously in development, then there must already be a similar version in production for the military, right?
stuff |
after 50 years. Good to see military work coming to the private sector. I supect we are looking at the SR-71's engine-type. Of course, a sub-orbital hop in something like the NASA-destroyed Delta Clipper would be more efficient in numerous ways, and have a flight-time of perhaps 90 minutes, max.
What about the hot chick riding shotgun?
[OK, I was a young kid at the time I watched it...]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
All ya need is corn ethanol. The thermodynamics are all good. :)
By the time these are certified for flight, too many people will be on the "no fly" list for there to be enough customers.
The last major triumphs of British engineering to actually get built were Concorde and the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors.
Ever since then the can't-do-won't-do attitude of Britain's "financial service economy" curtails any great technological projects. The only things that get built are science projects, with meager government funding.
Reaction Engines/Bristol Spaceplanes have some very interesting engine designs like SABRE. These are the people who designed the RB545 for Hotol (another great British triumph of procrastination over achievement).
Mark my words, this will sit firmly on the drawing board and will probably be reinvented in 20-30 years by the Chinese. The American's won't have it since they didn't invent it.
It sucks to be British unless you're in Banking or Insurance. Still, mustn't grumble. At least we're not French or German or foreign. Time for a nice cup of tea and a sit down.
Stick Men
MODS!
I can't believe you guys gave this joke an "Informative" rating... of course, I fully expect to be modded down as a Troll for criticising the moderators, but here's some info for you clueless newbs...
Lempel-Ziv compression
Huffman compression
As you can see, these are forms of data compression, not the compression of gasses, as would be used in a ramjet engine. Please, please have an idea of what you're reading about before marking something "informative". This may deserve a "Funny" mod, but it's not "Informative" - at least, not about the topic at hand.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The parent for this should be modded funny, not insightful.
That was a joke about the length of security checks.
Well, maybe the person that marked it "insightful" is American.
That's explain it.
you could use it to knock down bigger skyscrapers and the agencies won't have to explain why they did nothing - noone saw them comming!
Ozone polluting Concorde... the Trident w/ the innovative collapsing wings...
A British company has designed an ego-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours.
There. Fixed that for you.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
The problem with building LARGE aircrafts is that you have to have enough of them to make things costs effective. The aircraft will not happen because it is too big. Instead, the qsst will happen first at mach 1.8, and then it will be upgraded to mach 4-5. The simple fact is that flying multiple mach IS expensive and will be limited for a time to those with loads of money. Once enough designs have been done, built, and tried, then we will see super fast large aircrafts. Of course, with the emphasis these days on hypersonic (in the mach 9-15 range), I think that it will be the next big thing after the qsst.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Conceptual Mach 5 airliners are SO yesterday.
What I want to see is a Mach 5 CRUISELINER! That would be worth building!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No fancy dual-mode engines are necessary. Zubrin's Black Colt just pairs a couple of fighter jet engines with existing Kerosene/LOX rockets. By using in air refueling, you save a lot of structural weight. (You only have to build for empty weight on the ground.)
You could use such a vehicle as a 1st stage for cheap TSTO launch of small payloads. It can also be used for hypersonic intercontinental package delivery.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/blakcolt.htm
The idea also scales up. (To the point where the size of the fuel tanker becomes prohibitive.)
there are designs for ss aircraft that minimize the sonic boom, or spread it out over a longer period of time, lessening its impact. aerospace tech has advanced a lot since the 70's when those older designs were dreamed up.
This... is... SPACEPLANE!!!
Anyone notice the project acronym for this proposed plane: Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies (Lapcat).
;^)
This may make it an inviting target, not for terrorists, but Dr. Evil... Bwuhaaa
The europeans better make sure they don't put frick'n laser beams on it...
you could use it to knock down bigger skyscrapers and the agencies won't have to explain why they did nothing - noone saw them comming!
Yeah, there's a fat chance an unqualified (terrorist) pilot could fly such a plane at such a speed (or even a third of that speed) at very low altitude into a sky-scraper.
You just got troll'd!
Obviously not to Newark, but short trips are tailor made for flying yourself.
I know of more than one person who has a light plane and keeps a beater parked
at each airport.
The great thing about private aviation is no TSA checkpoints.
Boring. Wake me up when they design a plane that can fly from New York's Idyllwild Airport to the Belgian Congo in seventeen minutes.
The article is about a design for an engine that makes possible a fast jet.
NOTHING IN THE ARTICLE OR LINKS SAYS ECO-FRIENDLY.
>can it use existing runways?
With such small wings, and lack of resistance in the engines, ( i.e for very high speed ),
Its going to be much worse than the SR-71,
so Its either going to need an extrodinary long runway ( 3x to 4x of existing 747 runways ),
or its going to need a launch catapult. ( again, not existing runways )
>is it any noisier than existing airliners?
Completely unknown, since there is no actual model to test.
The article is about an engine that, makes possible the jetliner,
no model. But, both the SR-71, and the Concord, both made less noice at subsonic speeds then conventional aircraft, and much more noice at supersonic speeds.
>does it use less fuel per passenger mile than existing airliners?
Absolutly no chance of that, it will take enourmous amounts of power to get up to speed, and when it reaches the statosphere, its going to take more fuel to keep it at speed. Bad news is that since its such a sleek design, that its going to take a lot more power/reverse thrust/noise to land and stop.
>The only thing that now makes me laugh about this project is that it would mean you spend far >longer queueing to get through the security checks than you actually do in flight...
Especially if they fly out of Heathrow, London, U.K.
but then the Concord finished its carier with Airport to hotel in 8 seconds.
>If you want to improve travel times, start counting time spend checking in
>and the security checks and then work on getting those reduced...
Everything will have to be pre-checked. You could just simply walk on with no-baggage, and have everyhing pre-purchased. Shopping and travel all in one!
Passenger service might not work, but there is a proven market for rapid package delivery. No need to develop new propulsion systems for this, though.
From what I read on their website, "has designed" really ought to be "has been offered some money to think about how such a thing might be designed" - they're not designing yet, they're just getting EU money to do a few preliminary design studies, with design to start in a decade or so, maybe, possibly, depending on the EU's willingness to give them a heap more money sometime in the future.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
THE CAKE IS A LIE.
Go Speed Racer! Go Speed Racer! Go Speed Racer, Goooooooooo!
"Mostly we get hydrogen from water"
NO, that's wrong. I love seeing posts modded up to +5 when they're factually incorrect.
http://www.fuelcellpartnership.org/fact_sheets/factsheet_hydrogen.html
"Currently, most hydrogen is produced by steam reforming natural gas."
NOT water. Natural gas. NOT WATER.
Parent's entire post is wrong. He's not insightful, he's just running off at the mouth. Nothing he said is accurate at all.
Stop modding people up when you're ignorant of the subject.
Right now, the industry is looking for more efficient and cheaper forms of air travel, not necessarily faster ones. As Concorde proved, the extra couple hours which the SST shaved off flight time was nowhere near enough to counter the cost of the aircraft's operation. Plus, the fact that a sonic boom forced the planes to fly either over water or unpopulated areas further limited their usefulness.
Operating an SST will be slightly easier with new advances in fly-by-wire technology and materials research. However that "ease" comes at the cost of a massive price tag associated with the aircraft's production and maintenance. Frankly, Concorde was one of the most technologically advanced failures of our time. It was not a functional failure, because it did precisely what it was designed to do. But, it was a financial failure which doomed it to the realm of "novelty travel" all the way until its retirement. Meanwhile the 747, which entered service 6 years earlier than the Concorde, is an airframe which still flies today and will probably be flying in new revisions for another two decades. The 747 carries many more people and has almost 8 times the fuel efficiency. This means cheaper tickets and more customers.
Concorde was a beautiful and impressive airplane which deserves admiration, but it or any other SST in commercial service is doomed to be a financial white elephant.
Spridle and Chim Chim are going to have a much harder time getting past the airport screeners than they did getting past Pops and Trixie.
I'm into computers and probably could bubble sort my way out of a paper bag, but I'm a physicist, you insensitive clod! I wouldn't be able to do it in an interview.
Seriously though, let's be fair. I didn't get the joke about compression algorithms, but I can fab you a processor on which you can execute them (my work is with semiconductors.) I'm sure there are many people here who wouldn't get the joke, but who are nevertheless nerdy (and proud) in their own right.
The new hallmark of British aviation, we have learnt our lessons from the Comet disaster.
We have totally eliminated the windows thus guaranteeing that this British airliner will NOT, in fact, fall apart in mid air from metal fatigue around the windows.
In fact, I daresay this Mach 5 is uncrashable!
Here now is Captain Smith with your in-flight chitter chatter.
Sig for hire.
That's simply an unrealistic claim.
If their engines are so revolutionary, efficient and just plain better then kerosene burning turbines then conventional airframes would no doubt be re-engined/tanked. At worst new airframes built around the new engines and fuel tanks but not capable of hypersonic flight would be used for routes like NY to LA.
There is simply no-way that a hypersonic transport can be economically competitive on short hops. Aerodynamics, landing speeds etc etc.
Making this kind of over the top claim is IMHO a frequent symptom of corporate crack smoking and/or BS slinging. In ether case often with the intent of sucking funds from government body involved.
If they want my attention they should build one of their engines and test run it to failure. They'd need to borrow someones supersonic wind tunnel to get intake conditions close enough to right. Right now there testing seams to consist of running a turbine on butane while dumping massive quantities of recently liquid nitrogen into the intake. (Sounds like fun, good work if you can get it!) I'd spend $US 3k on a mini-turbine and test in miniature on expendable drones dropped from the fastest airplane I could get my hands on. (Shooing for low cost data gathering, which still wouldn't be cheap.) I gotta wonder what it costs to blow up a turbine?
Shouldn't they be shooting chickens into the engine intake? Sounds like the chickens would freeze on the way in. Bird strikes sound ugly (delicate heat exchanges full of liquid H2).
In any case I call 'crack smokers' on them (for now).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually, things have only gotten bad the last 3 years or so. Up through lated 2004, early 2005, it was still very easy and cheap to get last minute flights, ones that you could rely on with much more confidence than now, and security was only just starting to get ridiculous.
Funny how Americans invest all their resources in the ultimate mortgage while Europeans invest all their money in the ultimate airliner.
From the pictures of the aircraft I can't see any cockpit.
Am I just blind, or is the plane flown completely via instruments and possibly cameras?
This "it always takes hours to go through security" sound cool to people who don't know any better but actually Concorde had a special check-in system with its own security so you basically just turned up and walked on without the security bottlenecks.
The Concorde didn't have trans-pacific endurance. Boeing dropped its SST project when they found they couldn't get enough endurance for its most promising market. Boeing clearly made the right move since the Concorde had no hope of recovering its multi-billion dollar development cost, though it did turn an operating profit on trans-Atlantic routes. (The institutional memory of this is a big reason why Boeing hasn't made an A380-sized plane, probably a good move again, since the 787 is undoubtedly more profitable than the A380 is.) There were plans for an extended range Concorde "B", but that was too controversial after a government bail out.
The upshot? This thing may very well be built, and we may have hypersonic flight for $8,000 one way, but the investors will probably either get sunk or bailed out by a government.
+0 not funny