The A-HyM Hypersonic Air Master is designed to carry 170 passengers and cruise at an altitude of 30,000 metres while travelling at speeds of Mach 7.3
A groundbreaking hypersonic airliner could cut London-New York flight times to a mere 45 minutes.
The revolutionary A-HyM Hypersonic Air Master is set to transform air travel by flying at Mach 7.3-over 5,600 mph (9,000 kph). Designed to carry 170 passengers, it could reduce the transatlantic journey from the usual seven hours, making transatlantic travel quicker than ever before.
In comparison, Concorde typically flew from London to New York in just under three and a half hours, compared to about eight hours on a subsonic flight. Spanish designer Oscar Viñals says the A-HyM would cruise at an altitude of 30,000 metres, far above conventional jets, using advanced heat-resistant materials like titanium and carbon fibre to withstand temperatures up to 1,000°C.
Its innovative Sonic Boom Mitigation System aims to reduce the disruptive noise of breaking the sound barrier, potentially allowing supersonic-and even hypersonic-flights over land without disturbing communities below. Powered by a next-generation hydrogen-fuelled combined-cycle engine, the aircraft would blend turbojet, ramjet, and oblique detonation technologies for both speed and eco-friendliness.
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Inside, passengers would enjoy spacious, comfortable cabins equipped with virtual panoramic windows and advanced entertainment systems designed to handle the unique conditions of hypersonic flight.
Although only a concept at this stage, the A-HyM illustrates how rapid breakthroughs in materials science, propulsion systems, and aerodynamics are making the prospect of ultra-fast and sustainable global travel increasingly plausible.
According to Oscar Viñals: “This aircraft concept would allow its users not only to experience a unique flight at dizzying speeds in excellent conditions, but it would also allow them to “master” time, because a trip, for example, from London to Los Angeles would only take an hour and a half, from boarding at Heathrow international airport to disembarking at LAX (Los Angeles International Airport).”
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The A-HyM aircraft’s developers are far from the only ones perusing the dream of commercial super-sonic flight. In January the Boom supersonic jet – dubbed the ‘new Concorde’ – officially broken the sound barrier.
The Colorado-based company Boom launched its XB-1 test plane from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port for a test flight in January, reaching a speed of Mach 1.1, or 844 miles per hour while flying at about 35,000 feet.
A plane is classed as having reached ‘supersonic’ speeds once it passes Mach 1. The Boom XB-1 is the first civil supersonic jet made in the US to break the sound barrier.
The goal of crashing through the sound barrier, and the loud bang that happens when planes do, is part of the reason super-fast air travel proved difficult from a business perspective.
As iconic and beautiful as the Concorde’s curved-delta wing shape was, there had always been a fundamental problem with the plane before it was mothballed for good. Smashing through the sound barrier causes a huge bang that has big consequences of those on the ground. During a 1965 test over Oklahoma city by the US Air Force, hundreds of reports of smashed windows were made.
The potential to cause this kind of disruption meant that Concorde could only fly certain routes at supersonic, meaning no high-speed flights over land. This crushed the business case for the aircraft in the US as cities such as Los Angeles and New York could not be linked up effectively.
Climate scientists also began to express alarm about the impact of the Concorde on the ozone layer, specifically the potentially damaging impact its emissions could have while flying at 60,000 feet – something it needed to do to get into air thin enough.
The relatively small number of passengers onboard coupled with the large amount of fuel required to fly so fast (compared to slower air travel), meant fluctuations in oil price hit the airline hard. At points customers were paying close to $12,000 for a single trip, back in 2003. Operators Air France and British Airways had to have reserve planes made as back-ups, which added to the spiralling bill.