A newly designed supersonic jet would be able to fly passengers from New York City to London in just 80 minutes.
Dubbed the Hyper Sting, the conceptual plane would be nearly twice as large and travel twice as fast as the world’s last commercial supersonic jet, Concorde, which was retired in 2003.
The Hyper Sting, at 328 feet long with a 168-foot wingspan, would dart up to 170 passengers across the Atlantic and beyond at speeds of 2,486mph — more than three times the speed of sound.
“Concorde was a brilliant piece of machinery, a noble experiment, but it put too many emissions in the environment, too much noise into our communities, and was too expensive to operate,” the Spanish designer of the craft, Oscar Viñals, told The U.S. Sun.
Two ramjet engines powered by a small nuclear reactor would propel the jet to its incredible speeds. It would additionally require the use of a cold-fusion nuclear reactor, which to date is still a theoretical concept, The Sun reported.
“A new era of supersonic flight might be just around the corner, but there are challenges to overcome when it comes to flying faster than the speed of sound,” Viñals said.
Viñals is also behind the designs of other large-scale, high-speed flight projects, including the Sky Whale and Big Bird. He decided to scale back his massive plane designs with the Hyper Sting and instead focus on designing a high-speed jet that could whizzing through the air in the near future.
“Today, there are some projects for a new era of supersonic flights from different private and public initiatives, some of those are well underway and could become in a few years a real concept.”