Billed as Concorde’s much bigger and faster successor, the plane’s hi-tech liquid hydrogen engines will propel it to 3,400mph — FIVE TIMES the speed of sound.
But its 300 passengers will not see much on the way. It has no windows as the searing external heat generated at Mach 5 would melt them.
The aircraft, code-named A2, is still on the drawing board. But its designers from British firm Reaction Engines say it could well become reality.
Boss Alan Bond said: “It sounds incredible by today’s standards but I don’t see why future generations can’t make day trips to Australasia.
“The total flight time from Europe to Australia, allowing for air traffic control, would be 4 hours 40 minutes.” The company, of Abingdon, Oxfordshire, has been given European Space Agency funding. The agency wants to find new propulsion systems that could dramatically cut long-haul flight times.
The A2 is 139m long but lighter than a Jumbo jet. It would fly to Oz 19 miles above Earth in the middle of the stratosphere, the second layer of our atmosphere, heading over the North Pole and Pacific.
But it has a tiny carbon footprint as it produces only water vapour and nitrous oxide as exhaust.
Tickets are expected to cost around £2,000.
