Virgin Galactic ha announced a new supersonic plane capable of traveling from New York to London in about 90 minutes. The flight normally lasts 7 hours 50 minutes.
It will be designed with the help of Rolls Royce, who was in charge of the turbines of the Concorde, which stopped flying in 2003. Of course, according to Virgin, only 19 people can fit per flight.
To achieve this, the plane would rise to 60,000 feet (18.3 kilometers), which is twice the usual height of commercial jets. It would achieve a speed of up to 3,700 kilometers per hour or about three times the speed of sound.
Higher heights less friction with the air and therefore there is a greater possibility of moving faster with less effort. The problem has always been to keep the aerodynamics less dense in the air, in addition to the effort required to achieve such lift.
That is why the project is from Virgin Galactic, which is dedicated to exploring the commercialization of space and subspace travel. Last June, George Whitesides, former CEO of the company, explained that they want to expand the business model to supersonic flights.
The company founded by Richard Branson It has not offered dates for the construction and testing of the new supersonic aircraft. There are also no estimates on when they would start operations.
More expensive but much faster flights on smaller planes
According to Whitesides, there is a large market for people who are willing to travel very fast on smaller but more exclusive planes.
The objective is obtain a minority share of the business class or first class long distance market, which corresponds to about 300,000 million dollars annually. “If we capture 5%, that’s a large number, between $ 10,000 and $ 15,000 annually.”
Supersonic travel was possible between 1969 and 2003 when the Concorde I was flying thanks to British Airways Y Air France. The retirement of operations, according to both airlines, was the low number of passengers after the accident of July 25, 2000, increase in maintenance costs and the aviation crisis that triggered the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.
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