A Chinese aerospace company has successfully completed the first test flight of a groundbreaking hypersonic passenger aircraft.
The “can” in this title is pretty disingenuous.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/14809770
There was no test flight. This publication saw the animated video and thought it was real.
Since Beehaw isn’t federated with the instance you linked, I’ll paste the comment you linked here for anyone who doesn’t want to mess with opening it externally:
This article is based on a report from the Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/china-hypersonic-flights-speed-concorde-b2051192.html nowhere does it say they have completed a test flight.
The brand Space Transportation, also known as the company Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology, has released an animated video which shows how its proposed “space flights” might look
This place really loves slop from random garbage sources, we’ll share anything with a URL.
And the images are unrelated concept art too. lol
To put this in perspective, you could have breakfast in London and make it to New York in time for a mid-morning coffee, with the journey taking just 1.5 hours.
Uh, let me do the math on that one…
If I eat breakfast in London at 8am, and then immediately board a Hypersonic jet to New York at 8:30am, I’ll arrive in NYC at 3pm, having missed mid-morning coffee by about 4 hours before I ate breakfast…
Wait, isn’t it the other way around? You should arrive in NY earlier than you left London, since NY is 5 hours behind London. So if you leave at 8:30 and arrive 1.5 hours later, it should only be 5AM when you arrive.
You might need a third breakfast before your elevenses in that case.
My take is that best case scenario you’d arrive roughly at the same time you left.
If you have breakfast in London at 8am, then make it to the airport by 8:30, you’re at the gate at 9:30 after one hour of security and controls, and you’ve made it exactly at the time when boarding starts, which usually is 45 minutes before takeoff on most airlines. You take off at 10:15, arrive at 11:45 (which is 6:45 local time), then still have to go through half an hour of border control and getting out of the airport, and then another half an hour to get to the city centre and have a coffee.
You’d still arrive at about 8:30, but I don’t see the whole ordeal taking any less than 5 hours.
I routinely take a 1.5 h flight to visit my family and while I’m a fair bit away from the airport, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get door-to-door in less than 8 hours. 6 if we are measuring departures lounge to arrivals.
Yeah they really didn’t think through time zones there…
that went well for concorde, didn’t it?
There’s the environmental impact: these ultra-fast planes burn through massive amounts of fuel, releasing far more emissions than regular aircraft
Hypersonic flights are a way to get us to a NON-inhabitable earth faster than ever before.
Well, the good news is since this kind of hypersonic flight is not efficient or affordable, while there are 150k daily commercial flights, these aircraft will probably fly more like 2-6 times daily for their specific wealthy passengers that would pay obscene amounts of cash to save a few hours.
The Concord only flew 4 times daily at its peak.
This feels like a “may be able to” situation. Once they’ve completed a flight from New York to London, I can get on board with the notion of them being able to fly from New York to London.
Do the passengers survive?
60% of the time, it works every time.
The best technology ever stolen. That’s why they named their company Bejioing.