Inside the plans for a Chinese hypersonic plane that will fly from London to New York in less than two hours
Having spent time working in Shanghai the last time there was talk of a ‘super plane’, Jonathan Margolis gives his verdict on whether we’ll be seeing these jets take flight in the near future
The news this week that a Chinese company has test flown a prototype for a hypersonic passenger aircraft that could whisk 70 passengers across the Atlantic in 90 minutes as early as 2027 has understandably made headlines around the world.
The new Yunxing aircraft, its Beijing maker says, will be capable of 3,100mph – more than double the speed of the late, great Anglo-French Concorde. The prospect of an Atlantic hop of under two hours and a more leisurely four-hour flight from London to Sydney is mindblowing – the added detail from makers Lingkong Tianxing Technology that the Yunxing will take off and land vertically (VTOL) is straight 1950s science fiction comic territory.
We should be extremely cautious about being dismissive of Chinese technological advances. Even a few years ago, the idea that dozens of really very good, fully Chinese electric cars and buses would be available – and in service – in Britain in 2024 would have been laughable.
Thirty years ago, most Chinese consumer products were the like of cheap, tinny cameras and ornamental fans. They’ve come a huge distance, but even today, wholly Chinese consumer products, as opposed to sophisticated Western and Japanese innovations manufactured in China, are still quite rare.
But news of the Yunxing needs to be put into context. A humungous amount of context. Context which, I believe, makes the prospect of pigs flying a little more likely than the Yunxing ever, let alone in three years, whooshing up vertically over central London (VTOL aircraft don’t need an airport) and plopping down in central Manhattan in the time it takes you to watch three episodes of Eastenders.
Where to start with the context?
The magnificent-looking Concorde, a product of 19 years’ intensive development in Bristol and Toulouse from 1957 onwards, took three hours to speed celebrities and business tycoons across the pond, effectively arriving two hours before they took off. The Concorde was cramped, but one of the greatest triumphs of aeronautical engineering, as well as the last such British achievement.
However, Concorde, whose last commercial flight was in 2003, was really a flop. It seemed to be the dawning of the future, but it is now seen as the end of an outdated, 1950s vision of things to come. It burned too much fuel, it was too noisy and the sonic boom problem – the massively loud sound like a thunderclap that is unavoidable with faster-than-sound aircraft – meant that it was banned from flying almost anywhere in the world over land.
The tiny fleet of 14 production aircraft – half British Airways and half Air France – was grounded for a year after a crash in Paris in 2000. Then the project was terminated in 2003, when the last commercial flight landed. The planes were old and obsolete, and there was no new supersonic plane even in early development.
More than that, the taste for superfast travel had gone out of fashion. They were environmentally dodgy and all in all just a bad look. Luxurious private aircraft that didn’t deafen everyone was much more 21st century.
Even the internet played its part in dooming supersonic. In 1976, when Concorde first flew, there were times when important people with important meetings and important documents to sign could make a case for getting across the Atlantic quicker than a London to Glasgow train.
As early as 2003, online technology weakened the case to the point where Concorde was basically there to simply get the likes of Joan Collins, David Frost and Princess Diana – all regulars – to and from fun lunches on one side or the other of the Atlantic.
But the slightly counterintuitive outdatedness of supersonic flying is not the greatest reason for context over the new Yunxing hypersonic airliner.
Boring as it is, and duly taking into account the speed of Chinese technological progress, there’s still an extremely important caveat. It’s not just that building a hypersonic passenger aircraft is a massive technical challenge that has never even been attempted before – there are dozens of reasons that make it very nearly impossible.
The vertical take-off element is just one element that suggests to many in the aircraft industry that the whole project is a mickey-take designed to attract investors and do little else.
China has only ever built two Boeing/Airbus-standard jet-engined passenger planes, and they have only flown in commercial service in the past few years. The bigger and newer of the two, the Comac C119, first flight just last year, is not licensed to operate anywhere outside China, and there are barely any flying in China, which has almost as many domestic flights – almost all in Boeings and Airbus aircraft – as the US.
The other, Comac’s ARJ21, is flying outside China in tiny numbers, having been bought by airlines in Indonesia and the Republic of Congo, but nowhere else. I have also spoken with Chinese people who refuse to board a locally designed and built aircraft on the grounds that it might not be, well, safe – even though almost all the components that keep it in the air, most notably the engines, are imported from the West. It should be noted that Chinese airlines actually have a perfectly good safety record.
However, the, shall we say, immaturity of Chinese airline manufacture is not just uninformed gossip. The Royal Aeronautical Society’s online journal earlier this year posed the question of whether China could break the global Boeing/Airbus monopoly. The answer was, not really, no.
Just one of the experts quoted in the essay, a senior adviser in Chinese business and economics at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “I think the prospects for both [aircraft] are relatively dim, particularly the ARJ21. I think both are not well-designed planes. Both took a long time to come to market and they’re competing against rivals with better aircraft that have long safety records and loyal customers.”
It's not hard to see, then, how a hypersonic Chinese passenger plane by 2027 is a little unlikely. Even conventional aircraft take a long, long time to develop. This writer once spent a week working in the British consulate in Shanghai, where there was much talk of how a Chinese wide-bodied rival to the Boeing 747 and 777, the Comac C929, was about to be announced and how this was going to cause havoc for the big Western plane makers.
These conversations were in 2010, and the Royal Aeronautical Society article notes that the C929 is still “some years down the road”.
By way of comparison to the hypersonic Yunxing, consider the timeline of two other very fast passenger planes from the long post-Concorde era: the 2,300mph Virgin Galactic VSS Unity Spaceplane and the Boom Overture, a Concorde-like aircraft being developed in Colorado.
The Virgin offering was first mooted by Sir Richard Branson in 2004 and, although it has flown several times with more than 60 people, is still in development. The latest date for a full, regular service is 2026.
Boom, meanwhile, which started up in 2014, doesn’t expect to have its 90-passenger, 1,100mph Overture in service before 2029 – this in spite of already having orders in from Virgin, Japan Airlines, United and American Airlines.
Will the hypersonic Chinese passenger plane ever become reality? You do the maths.
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