Beijing to New York in 2 hours? Chinese team reveal hypersonic plane ambition



A Chinese research team has come up with a novel design for an ultra-fast plane they say will be able to take dozens of people and tonnes of cargo from Beijing to New York in about two hours.Shanghai to Tokyo flights
The plane would travel at hypersonic speed – meaning at more than 6,000km/h (3,700mph), faster than five times the speed of sound – according to the team, which is also involved in China’s top secret hypersonic weapons programme.
The speed of sound is about 343 metres per second, or 1,235km/h.
“It will take only a couple of hours to travel from Beijing to New York at hypersonic speed,” the researchers led by Cui Kai wrote in a paper this month in Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy, published by Science China Press.
At present, it takes a normal passenger jet about 14 hours to fly between the two cities – a distance of about 11,000km.Cui and his team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing tested a scaled-down model of the plane in a wind tunnel which was also used to carry out aerodynamics evaluations for China’s newest hypersonic weapon prototypes.
They pushed the model plane to seven times the speed of sound – which works out to more than 8,600km/h – and found it performed surprisingly well, with low drag and high lift.
The team at the academy’s Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics, under the Institute of Mechanics, have called the new hypersonic vehicle the “I-plane”.
That name comes from the shadow cast by the aircraft on the ground – in the shape of a capital “I” – when it is bearing down like a dive-bomber.With two layers of wings, the I-plane design resembles that of biplanes used during the first world war. The earliest type of aircraft, most biplanes disappeared after the 1930s as plane designers pursued higher speeds and fuel efficiency.
Fast-forward to 2018, and China’s latest hypersonic vehicle features lower wings that reach out from the middle of the fuselage like a pair of embracing arms. A third flat, bat-shaped wing meanwhile extends over the back of the aircraft.
The researchers said this biplane design means the aircraft will be able to handle significantly heavier payload than existing hypersonic vehicles that have a streamlined shape and delta wings.