New jet could cut flight time from London to New York to 1 hour

New jet could cut flight time from London to New York to 1 hour. August. 06, 2015 07:19. pen@donga.com.

People may be soon able to fly from London and New York within an hour.

The Daily Telegraph said Tuesday that leading European aircraft manufacturer Airbus recently applied for a patent at the U.S. Patent Office on “Concorde 2,” a supersonic passenger plane that can fly four times the speed of a sound. If “Concorde 2” is commercialized, a plane can fly from London to New York, a 5,585 kilometer distance, in one hour. It takes approximately seven hours in a normal airplane.

“Concorde 2” engine has strong propulsion power since jet engine and rocket motor are combined. The aircraft surges almost upright and breaks through velocity of sound. Airbus is planning a supersonic passenger plane that carries 20 people and two to three tons of cargo, and flies 8,850 kilometers at an altitude of 30 kilometers. “Concorde 2” is likely to be used for corporate and government leaders who have to come and go between Europe and America for business trips as well as for military purposes including reconnaissance and emergency transport. People engaged in manufacturing said the airplane will fly very high and will be little affected by existing antiaircraft missiles.

Airbus said it improved sharply noise problem, which was a major reason the previous Concorde failed to succeed commercially, but rejected commenting in detail.

“Concorde I,” the first supersonic passenger plane, flied at a maximum speed of Mach 2, as it installed Rolls Royce’s Olympus engine, at an altitude of 18 kilometers, carrying 120 passengers. Introduced in 1976, 14 of them were operated by Air France and British Airways. However, a massive plane crash occurred in July 2000 in Paris that killed 113 passengers and later suspended flight operations in 2003 due to adverse economic conditions such as extreme fuel use and passenger traffic decline.