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."

Comments

CG is Cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Oh, won't somebody please think of the math

[Ancient_Hacker]

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.

Re:Oh, won't somebody please think of the math

[reemul]

Right. We'll just step up production from our vast hydrogen mining industry. Oh, wait. We don't have anything like that. Mostly we get hydrogen from water, which often means running an electric current through it. Since US enviros oppose nuclear, won't allow new dams for hydro because it upsets the fish, and have fought new natural gas exploration for fear it will damage pristine ecosystems, that probably means that coal is being burned to produce that electricity. Nice, clean, eco-friendly coal. In fact, because of losses creating the hydrogen and then burning it in the engine, it's less efficient than the coal plant, so you have to burn more coal for the energy used.

Hydrogen is eco-friendly *at the point of use*, but unless someone can magically cause it to appear its production isn't environmentally sound at all. You just hide the costs and emissions somewhere that the public hopefully won't notice it. (Same with electric cars. Using electric doesn't pollute. Making it certainly does. Anyone telling you different wants your money or your vote.)

Re:Oh, won't somebody please think of the math

[Waffle Iron]

We're stuck in the dark ages of sub-sonic flight because a vocal minority - mostly housewives with more time on their hands than brains - don't want their miserable little lives occasionally disrupted.

On a day with the right weather conditions, I can see the remnants of dozens of contrails in the sky at any given time. I certainly don't want to be subjected to a dish-rattling sonic boom for each one of those.

Basically, you'd be annoying hundreds of thousands of people each time a few dozen passengers shave a couple of hours off of a flight (but still spend 4 hours in traffic jams, terminal waiting areas, baggage areas and security lines at the endpoints). Those "housewives" are 100% correct on this one.

Streamlining doesn't just apply to the aircraft...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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. ^_^

I still don't get it

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Choice of fuel

[Bananatree3]

" To achieve the range requirement liquid hydrogen fuel is mandatory since the specific calorific energy of hydrocarbon fuels is too low."

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.

Re:Easy choice

[noidentity]

Wow, whoever modded this anything but funny needs to have their geek cards revoked.

Re:riiiight

[UnderDark]

"I for one, welcome our new ant overlords." --Kent Brockman

Long distance air travel sucks

[sjbe]

Why would this be a better option than a regular flight? Aside from being a relatively short trip... You can stop right there. I'd HAPPILY pony up to cut a 12,000 mile trip time by 2/3. I've flown from the US to Japan, China, Thailand, and Singapore and several other similar routes multiple times. Not just for business either. One such flight should be enough to convince you that anything which makes the trip faster is worthwhile. Trust me that spending 12+ hours in the air (often with 24+ hour trips once layovers are considered) with 400 of your "closest friends" is just no fun at all. Flying first/business class makes it a little more bearable but only a little. If you want to get there slowly, go really slow and take a boat like the Queen Mary 2. Otherwise the plane should go as fast as we can safely and economically make it go.

It seems they haven't learned from history

[RoninOtter]

Reaction Engines needs to take a lesson from BAE and the fact that all the Concordes are in museums, not the air.

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.