A UK firm has designed a hypersonic passenger plane that could, in the future, transport passengers between Europe and Australia in under five hours.
The A2 was developed by Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines. The company claims that the plane could carry 300 passengers at 4,000 miles per hour.
Support for the project was provided by the European Space Agency, with its developers claiming it is capable of sustaining a speed twice as fast as that of Concorde.
Alan Bond, a senior engineer and managing director at the company, told The Guardian: “The A2 is designed to leave Brussels international airport, fly quietly and subsonically out into the north Atlantic at mach 0.9 before reaching mach 5 across the North Pole and heading over the Pacific to Australia.
“The flight time from Brussels to Australia, allowing for air traffic control, would be four hours 40 minutes. It sounds incredible by today’s standards but I don’t see why future generations can’t make day trips to Australasia.”
British Airways and Air France both operated the supersonic plane Concorde from the 1970s until it was withdrawn from service in 2003.
