NEWS
A new hypersonic jet, dubbed zero emission hypersonic transportation (ZEHST), was anounced at Le Bourget airport on June 19, a day ahead of the start of the Paris international Air Show. The plane which debuted in mockup form is expected to travel at four times the speed of sound, or roughly 5,000 kilometers an hour. The project is being overseen by Airbus’ parent company, EADS based in Toulouse, France. The aircraft, as EADS said, could be standard in 2050 and the demonstration technologies could be ready for the first prototype taking to the skies by the end of this decade.

VIEWS
The biennial Paris International Air Show, known for springing up surprises from the blue, has once again lived up to its reputation, debuting the ZEHST—albeit in a model form. The concept envisages an airliner which will carry around 100 passengers, at the upper layers of stratosphere, hurtling at four times or more than the speed of sound, astonishingly cutting down travel times between destinations—Delhi to London in 80 minutes or Tokyo to Los Angeles in two and a half hours. Have the aircraft designers found a worthy successor to Concorde, the only commercially exploited supersonic transport in the world till date?

To redux, Concorde was designed in the 1960s with the combined efforts of British and French aviation companies. With its delta wing, cigar-shaped fuselage, four under-belly engines with massive air intakes and a long narrow nose which drooped during takeoffs and landings, Concorde was indeed a majestic aircraft. The aircraft flew for more than three decades in commercial service and contrary to general belief, profitably before it retired in 2003, in the wake of an only unfortunate accident in France, the effects of 9/11 terrorist attacks and some political factors. However, while Concorde may have retired, human desire to fly faster cannot be curbed forever. The quest for supersonic travel has continued unabated. The US, Russia, France and Japan are all involved in the field of futuristic SST designs, which apart from airliners has also generated intense research interest in the area of supersonic business jets (SSBJ). But the idea for the airliners to travel at hypersonic speeds has been comparatively a recent phenomenon. In 2008, a British team had-through its A2 programme-conceptualised a hypersonic aeroplane that could ferry up to 300 passengers from Brussels over the North Pole to Sydney in about four and a half hours. But actual unveiling of the model of a hypersonic passenger aircraft, that too by the parent company of the biggest manufacturer of airliners in the world, indicates that Airbus means true business in developing the concept to reality. Also, the Airbus’ concept to meet the divergent/contradictory propulsion requirements in the different regimes of a hypersonic cruise airliner is quite different. While the proposed A2’s four Scimitar engines use the turbine based combined cycle (TBCC) concept, or a double bypass turbofan ramjet to meet the differing propulsive requirements through a single power source, the Airbus has opted for using separate power plants to look after the specific regimes of hypersonic travel.