Reaction Engines Plane

[Sabre]

Company Info and Plane (A2).

A British company has designed an eco-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours. Reaction Engines has received funding from the European Space Agency to design the plane as part of the Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project. The A2 airliner would be capable of carrying 300 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 5.

Looks like a dart to me!

[avriette]

Company Info and Plane (A2).

A British company has designed an eco-friendly airliner that could make a trip from London to Sydney in under five hours. Reaction Engines has received funding from the European Space Agency to design the plane as part of the Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies project. The A2 airliner would be capable of carrying 300 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 5.

Looks like a dart to me!

Boeing's been working on an engine like that for a while. Turbines are generally very efficient engines, but when it comes to turbofans (what we use in airliners) there's a lot of air that escapes without mixing with fuel. Boeing was scavenging with a hybrid pulsejet setup, these guys are going a little differently. I really like the bypass idea. It would be possible to take an engine design like that and scale it up to Mach 5-7 speeds (after that, shit starts to explode without you even asking it to). I'm wondering why they're calling it "eco-friendly" if for no other reason than turbines burn so much less fuel per mile than, say, props or wheels.

I'm really kind of saddened that nobody's brought the Dyna-Soar/silbervogel designs that use high-altitude and gliding to fly, literally, around the world, at very high mach (up to an including escape velocity, incidentally), using very little fuel.

Alas. So many dreams in aerospace and so few birds.

Obligatory real-fast-bird pr0ns: http://manconquersspace.com/MCSMovieClips.html

Watch the trailer. It's enough to make me misty-eyed.

[complacent]

Oh wow, I gotta read up more on this one!