FANCY TRAVELLING from Paris to Tokyo in 2½ hours? What if the aircraft was soundless and caused hardly any pollution?
Eight years after the era of supersonic flight came to an end with Concorde’s last transatlantic crossing, the European aerospace group Eads – which owns aircraftmaker Airbus – has gone one better by confirming it is developing a hypersonic jet that takes off from a standard runway but uses rocket boosters to soar above the atmosphere.
“It is not a Concorde but it looks like a Concorde, showing that the aerodynamics of the 1960s were very smart,” Jean Botti, Eads’s chief technical officer, said at the Paris air show, where details of the audacious project were revealed.
The concept, known as Zehst (zero emission high speed transport), is being developed in collaboration with Japan. Like Concorde, it would be designed primarily for the business market and could carry 50-100 passengers.
According to Eads, the aircraft will take off conventionally using a standard turbofan engine burning an algae-derived biofuel, before rocket boosters kick in to start a sharp ascent, sending the aircraft soaring into the stratosphere.
Ramjet engines, currently used in missiles, will then take the aircraft up to altitudes of 32km – more than three times higher than standard passenger jets today. The hypersonic plane will have cruising speeds beyond Mach 4 (nearly 5,000km/h), or four times the speed of sound and more than twice that of the now-defunct Concorde. After a gliding descent, the turbofans will reignite for landing.
It may sound like science fiction, but Eads says its confidence is founded on the fact that the technology is mostly already in place. “Zehst has no novelty – it is all things that have been created before,” Mr Botti said.
By flying above the atmosphere and using biofuel to get the aircraft off the ground initially, the group hopes to avoid the supersonic boom and pollution for which Concorde was notorious. “When you are above the atmosphere, nobody hears anything,” Mr Botti remarked.
Despite releasing images of a jet that looks strikingly similar to the Concorde, Eads have stressed Zehst’s singularity. Whereas higher oil prices today would make Concorde uneconomical, the key technological advance in the Zehst is its cleanliness. The maker believes it can fuel the jet off hydrogen and oxygen, resulting in zero emissions.
The concept project comes as companies such as Virgin Galactic pursue plans to take paying customers on commercial space flights, and Zehst itself is being developed using research from Eads’s space arm Astrium.
Unlike Virgin Galactic customers, however, Eads says Zehst would have a maximum acceleration of 1.2G, meaning passengers will not need any specific equipment or training in order to fly.
With Boeing, the US rival of Eads-owned Airbus, also planning its own hypersonic jet, the scene is now set for a battle to design a new post-Concorde icon of passenger travel.
Developed in the 1960s, Concorde heralded a new age of supersonic travel, but its promise was never fulfilled. Jointly developed by France and the UK, and put in service in 1976, the aircraft reached a cruising speed of 1,350mph (2,175km/h), or twice the speed of sound, at a height of 60,000ft (18,000m). The distinctive droop-nosed aircraft was grounded after a Continental Airlines Concorde crashed near Paris in July 2000, killing 113 people.
It subsequently returned to service, but with declining air travel demand following the September 11th terrorist attacks, rising fuel prices and soaring maintenance costs, the programme faltered. The last commercial flight was in October 2003.
The Zehst research has been sponsored by the Direction Générale de L’Aviation Civile, a French agency, and Eads officials were yesterday due to meet with their Japanese colleagues to see what the project’s next steps should be.
Anyone looking forward to splash out the suitably stratospheric price of a rocket-powered flight from Paris to Tokyo flight will have to wait a while, however. Eads expects to have a demo in place by 2020, but an aircraft ready for commercial use is unlikely before 2050. “We’re not talking about a product that we launch in the next few years,” said Eads chief executive Louis Gallois. “We have to see about security, the integration of different technologies and how man reacts to it.”