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

Nothing New

[lymond01]

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.

Noise and price issues?

[Penguinisto]

The original SST project (US) never got off the ground, and the Concorde was nothing more than a status symbol for those who could afford the ungodly high ticket price for the NYC-London (or Paris) run. The Soviet version (TU-144?) only had a limited set of routes as well, and Aeroflot killed it off (IIRC) about the same time the USSR crashed.

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...

/P

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

[explosivejared]

If I remember correctly, math as well as NIMBY's contributed to the Concorde's poor effect on the environment. People weren't too keen on having sonic booms regularly occur over their neighborhoods as widespread commercial adoption occured, so Concorde flights had to take care to avoid disturbing high population areas. Any gains that this plan makes in engine efficiency will probably be offset by having to reconfigure flight plans from the most efficient to the least bothersome for residents.

I just don't think there is a commercial viability for supersonic flight. The need to decrease flight times from 20 hours to 5 hours is just not enough of an incentive to cover all the associated investments and pitfalls of implementation.

British Technology Never Flies

[turgid]

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.

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

[caffeineboy]

It might be splitting hairs, but most of our hydrogen comes from steam reformation of methane, not from electrolysis of water.

Your point about electric cars I don't really get. Sure you have a longer tailpipe with an electric car, but if your thermal efficiency and CO2 or whatever pollutant you care about per mile is less, you are still winning. There are other technical challenges for electric cars, and a lot of people might not see that you have to look at the bigger picture, but even when you do EVs look pretty good.

reference on EVs here

and yes I recognize that is an EV advocacy site, but their point is correct. IC engines have a thermal efficiency of about 15% or less. It's not hard to beat that with a stationary plant.

Now, about the present article - I'd like to see some analyses that say that you can actually fly a supersonic plane a good distance on hydrogen, and how the hell you think you can make that economical.