Photo: Warner Bros.
There isn’t much worse than air travel. From crazy airport traffic to absurdly long security lines, traveling via air is a real-life nightmare. Boeing is doing their best to change that.
While the aerospace company hasn’t perfected the irritating tasks of airport travel, they have proposed a new hypersonic plane allowing passengers to travel halfway across the world in just six hours.
The concept airliner, debuted at the annual American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in Atlanta, reportedly would fly at a staggering Mach 5 (3,800 miles per hour). This would allow for six hour flights from London to Australia. Even better, flights from New York to London would take just under two hours. It’s a drastic change from the now non-operational Concorde, which only flew Mach 2 and took nearly four hours to cross the Atlantic.
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Shockingly, Boeing admits their newest design could travel even faster, but suggested there was no need to test the limits.
“We settled on Mach 5 version,” says Kevin Bowcutt, Boeing’s senior technical fellow and chief scientist of hypersonics, who suggested that exceeding Mach 5 requires far more advanced engines and materials. “This aircraft would allow you to fly across the ocean and back in one day, which is all most people would want. So why go past those boundaries and complicate it? The world’s just not big enough to go much faster than Mach 5.”
Bowcutt also mentioned passengers would experience a full 12 minutes of G-Force while the plane accelerated to a cruising altitude. The new plane would fly at 95,000 feet, which is 30,000 feet higher than the aforementioned Concorde.
Boeing has yet to confirm how many passengers would fit on the hypersonic plane, though suggested it would not allow for more than 100 seats. A prototype is expected to be ready for air travel in five to ten years.
