Supersonic plane could fly from London to New York in 80 minutes

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• A new concept plane that can transport 170 passengers from London to New York in just 80 minutes has been unveiled.
• The Hyper Sting supersonic jet would surpass the speed and size of the legendary Concorde.
• The jet would be powered by two ramjet engines that would be fuelled by a small nuclear reactor.

A newly designed supersonic jet would be able to fly passengers from New York City to London in just 80 minutes.

Dubbed the Hyper Sting, the conceptual plane would be nearly twice as large and travel twice as fast as the world’s last commercial supersonic jet, Concorde. There has not been a commercial supersonic airliner since the last Concorde was retired in 2003 after 27 years in service.

The Hyper Sting, at 328 feet long with a 168-foot wingspan, would dart up to 170 passengers across the Atlantic and beyond at speeds of 2,486mph — more than three times the speed of sound.

“Concorde was a brilliant piece of machinery, a noble experiment, but it put too many emissions in the environment, too much noise into our communities, and was too expensive to operate,” the Spanish designer of the craft, Oscar Viñals, told The U.S. Sun.

Concorde was a revolutionary British and French design but was retired due to high-cost tickets, low passenger numbers, noise, and safety concerns.

Two ramjet engines powered by a small nuclear reactor would propel the jet to its incredible speeds. It would additionally require the use of a cold-fusion nuclear reactor, which to date is still a theoretical concept.

“A new era of supersonic flight might be just around the corner, but there are challenges to overcome when it comes to flying faster than the speed of sound,” Viñals said.

Viñals is also behind the designs of other large-scale, high-speed flight projects, including the Sky Whale and Big Bird. He decided to scale back his massive plane designs with the Hyper Sting and instead focus on designing a high-speed jet that could whizzing through the air in the near future.

“Today, there are some projects for a new era of supersonic flights from different private and public initiatives, some of those are well underway and could become in a few years a real concept.”

Source: The Sun