This design for a plane can fly you from London to New York in just 11 minutes, reaching a top speed of Mach 24 – nearly 12 times faster than the Concorde!
Charles Bombardier, an industrial designer, is behind both of the projects. He dubs his latest concept, the Antipode. The project is formed in collaboration with Abhishek Roy, founder of Lunatic Koncepts.
The plane can carry up to 10 passengers, while covering almost 12,430 miles in less than an hour.
“I wanted to create an aircraft concept capable of reaching its antipode — or diametrical opposite — as fast as possible,” Bombardier told Forbes.
The Antipode’s wings are equipped with rocket boosters that propel the structure to 40,000 feet and enables it to reach speeds of Mach 5.
The plane would be powered by a scramjet engine, which doesn’t have any moving parts and uses oxygen from the environment, instead of carrying heavy tanks onboard to create the required thrust.
The sonic boom will be too much to bear for the localities underneath, so the creators look to use mufflers to kill the noise.
Joseph Hazeltine is an engineer at Wyle and provides technical support to both NASA and the U.S. Department of Defence. He suggested an aerodynamic technique called Long Penetration Mode (LPM), which uses a nozzle on the aircraft’s nose to help blow out the air and cool down the surface temperature, which can rise up to more than 900 degrees when the plane is flying at full speed.
The designer explains in a video on his website:
“It’s all about innovation. Share your idea, and it opens up a door for other designers to build on it.”
While the idea seems all exciting and dandy, even NASA hasn’t been able to create a stable scramjet yet! We’ll have to wait a bit longer to view the Antipode beast in action.
