Could China & India Deliver Hypersonic Flight?

With pilot fatigue being a major concern for Flight Safety could the solution be in faster air travel?

 I have talked about various Hypersonic aircraft projects in the works in some of my previous blogs. I feel speed is the way forward. With Boeing about to put the B747 to bed and Airbus following suit with the failed Airbus A380 more attention and money is gravitating towards Hypersonic aircraft projects.

 The Chinese are joining the race. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC), a state aerospace firm has reportedly begun research on an aircraft capable of taking off from a runway and carrying a crew into low Earth orbit. The design is looking like a more efficient successor to Nasa’s Space Shuttle, which was launched on a rocket but landed on a runway.

 When completed it could dramatically reduce the costs of space travel and give China a boost in the renewed space race.

 The plan entails the aircraft taking off like a normal plane, before a supersonic scramjet engine kicks in to lift it to almost 100 km above sea level.

At this point, rocket boosters will provide the additional thrust, giving it enough power to escape Earth's lower atmosphere. Plans for the aircraft were discussed on state broadcaster CCTV, with a plane entering service by 2030.

 With Nasa's Space Shuttle programme decommissioned since 2011, a hybrid space plane could give the Chinese an edge in the space race.

There is much detail published yet but the craft could potentially hit speeds of Mach 5.

This news from China comes a few weeks after Russia revealed it was developing a hypersonic aircraft capable of travelling anywhere in the world in two hours.

The European Space Agency has also been funding research into a revolutionary Sabre Engine capable to propelling an aircraft at 4,000 mph.

 Earlier this year China had tested a new hypersonic aircraft capable of travelling up to 7,000mph.

The DF-ZF glider was fixed to a ballistic missile and launched from Wuzhai missile launch centre in central China. It is intended as a way to deliver missiles at high speeds around the world.

 CASTC’s  new hypersonic space plane will use a combined cycle air breathing engine along with rocket motors. This is a similar approach to that taken by the British-built Skylon hypersonic aircraft, which uses engines built by Reaction Engines to achieve hypersonic flight.

 Zhang Yong, one of the engineers working on the space plane, claimed that the technology will be ready in the next three to five years, with a full-scale model ready to launch by 2030.

Yang Yang, another engineer from CASTC also hinted that space plane could be used for space tourism, as it would have a more gradual acceleration than space launch rockets.

India's space scientists have completed ground tests of the homegrown supersonic combustion ramjet (Scramjet) that may eventually lead to building a hypersonic plane by the country.

The air-breathing engine has achieved a speed of six mach (a mach is the speed of sound), for seven seconds, which means it can fly three times faster than existing fighter and consume lesser fuel than the current aircraft.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has certified and reported the tests were conducted over a period of two years. 

ISRO scientists at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram will attempt in the next three years to fly the Scramjet in atmosphere. The air-breathing engine will be released from a two-stage sounding rocket and tested to fly at speed of over mach six.

ISRO believes that a hypersonic airplane may drastically cut costs of carrying a load to space at about $ 500 to $ 1000 per kg, as against the current costs of $ 12,000 to $ 15,000 per kg.

Flying from one side of the planet to the other will take 3-4 hours and this will solve the pilot fatigue problem. However, between now and then we need to develop some interim solutions to solve this problem...

is Managing Partner of Aircraft Trading Company Tyrus Wings. He is also an accomplished Airline Transport Pilot having flown both private Jets and for the airlines. Fabrizio is also a bestselling author and inspirational speaker & has been featured on Russia Today (RT), Social Media Examiner, Bloomberg, Channel 5, Chicago Tribune, Daily Telegraph, City Wealth Magazine, Billionaire.com, Wealth X, Financial Times, El Financiero and many other Media offering insight on the aviation world. Fabrizio is also regularly featured as an Aviation Analyst on Russia Today (RT). Fabrizio is also aviation special correspondent for luxury magazine, Most Fabullous Magazine. Fabrizio is also considered one of the world's top 30 experts in using Linkedin for business. You can tune in weekly to Fabrizio's business Podcast Living Outside the Cube available both in video & audio. You can also follow Fabrizio's aviation videos on Tyrus Wings TV.

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