Hypersonic Mach 5, Hydrogen powered plane.

Today’s airliners area huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and a major burner of oil based fuels. In the not too distant future, new airliners will be green, non-polluting, and incredibly fast.

One concept aircraft that will probably soon receive massive funding is the A2, this new hypersonic jet airliner, capable of reaching 3,400Mph, a speed known as Mach5, and carrying up to 300 people, is being developed by a company called Reaction Engine.

The jet will not only obtain these incredible speeds, but it will do so, putting out zero emissions. The project is being partly funded by the E.U’s LAPCAT or Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies.

Lapcats brief is to build a passenger aircraft capable of flights from Europe to Australia in less than…. four hours! The A2 will have those capabilities, and will do it without burning oil based fuels.

Concorde the only plane ever built, that in any way resembles the proposed A2, was an economic disaster and had very limiting technical problems, which designers of the new plane of have to keep in mind.

Concorde had a very limited flying distance that, for example, stopped it flying across the Pacific, which are the most profitable routes in the world by airlines. Concorde, also was too slow, even though it was the fastest airliner in the world, it was only capable of a cruising speed Mach 2, which meant that it actually spent most of his time flying below Mach 1 to avoid sonic booms thus causing it to be running in ‘second gear’ a lot of the time, so using huge amounts of fuel.

The designers of the A2 wish to avoid all these shortfalls. The new Hydrogen engines will have two distinct thrusting capabilities. One a turbojet, the other a ramjet, this combination of two systems, should allow the aircraft to be highly fuel-efficient. Even at slow speeds, but also being capable of the huge thrust needed to go hypersonic.

The plane will have some basic differences to regular modern aircraft, for one thing, there will be no windows, as the heat generated by such high speeds, would require incredibly thick and heavy glass materials.

The most interesting quality of the A2 is the idea that it would actually put out no pollution, totally zero emissions. The only emission from the engines would be water vapour mixed with nitrous oxide, both of which would simply blend into the atmosphere without any harmful effects.

Other experts on hypersonic technology say that the A2 is a fundamentally sound and viable project. Of course, as this would be a giant leap in technology, there will be many pitfalls and obstacles before it actually fly’s.

But it is believed that in the foreseeable future, weekend breaks in Sydney may become a reality, for Europeans.