Hermeus Hypersonic wants to bring New York to London in 90 minutes

(CNN) - US startups have announced plans to develop an aircraft that can reach five times the speed of sound and deliver passengers between New York and London in 90 minutes or less.

Atlanta-based aerospace company Hermeus Corporation announced it had received funds from seed funders and private investors to develop aircraft that would fly Mach 5 - five times faster than Mach 1, the speed of sound.

If the project is successful, it can revolutionize commercial transatlantic flights. At present the flight between London and New York takes more than seven hours.

The manufacturer hopes that the aircraft can travel 4,600 miles at a cruising speed of 3,300 miles per hour.

"We've made a journey to revolutionize global transport infrastructure and take it from dial-up to the broadband era by radically increasing the speed of long-distance travel," said AJ Piplica, one of the founders and CEOs of Hermeus Statement on the company website.

Founders of Hermeus included SpaceX's former employees, rocket launch company Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' secret space company. The four founders worked together in Generation Orbit, where they worked on the development of the latest US Air Force hypersonic and X-plane rocket aircraft.

Paul Bruce, aviation lecturer at Imperial College London, issued a warning tone.

"The biggest challenge for hypersonic flights is the thrust," he said. "We have a small vehicle with a Scramjet, a sophisticated type of jet engine, flown up and hypersonisch flown.This is quite experimental and we have to go a long way before we see it in passenger aircraft."

"There are many other difficulties in flying fast regularly - we have the technical ability to do so.

"The bigger problem is financial problems and possibly environmental problems, fast flying will consume a lot of fuel and it will be far less efficient than slow flying, but if there is a market for it, I have no doubt we can build one." this type of plane. "

Hermeus co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica told CNN that the development of a passenger aircraft would take a decade.

"We have a lot of flights ahead of us at this time - we will have at least two smaller aircraft iterations that we will build, test and learn from that time," he said.

"The biggest challenge is to merge and test the core technology, and it's very difficult to restore the Mach 5 environment to land, which requires rethinking the development of vehicles used in this environment, which means you We have to build a lot of equipment. " hard and fly early so we can learn and change quickly. "

Tickets cost around $ 3,000 for a one-way trip between New York and London, according to Piplica.

The Hermeus Corporation was not the first to undertake a supersonic journey. In June 2018, Boeing launched a plan for a hypersonic passenger aircraft. Lockheed Martin and Aerion Corporation are also working on the production of supersonic aircraft.

If successful, the Hermeus aircraft is twice as fast as the Concorde, the supersonic aircraft that completed its last transatlantic flight in October 2003 and operated between New York and London in less than four hours.

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