Three-Hour Rocket Flights to Australia Possible in 10 Years
Anyone who has taken one of the many flights to Australia – or any long-haul destination – can find them a little heavy going, but scientists Down Under are trying to reduce the standard 24-hour journey time to just over 10 per cent of this.
Earlier this week, scientists at the Australian defence department, working with the US Air Force, took to the outback and successfully tested prototypes of new planes which soar through the air at six times the speed of sound – as part of a project catchily entitled Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE).
One of the hypersonic planes managed to achieve top speeds of 5,840km per hour – an incredible speed which would reduce the time of flights to Australia from Europe to just 2.9 hours. Such aircraft would shrink the time it takes flights to New York from London to a mere 52 minutes.
Although the hypersonic flight technology is being tested for the military at the moment, aviation history suggests that commercial flights will eventually benefit, once the workability of state-of-the-art ultra-speed planes is established.
Now for the bad news – HIFiRE requires the plane to be shot into space with a rocket before it dives back into the earth’s atmosphere, and at the moment, the re-entry causes the aircraft to break up. But scientists are confident that they will have the kinks ironed out when the flight technique becomes genuinely feasible in about a decade’s time.
Until then, passengers wanting to take flights to Australia, New York or any other long-haul destination will have to use the traditional method and book one of the cheap flights available online.
General Travel News posted by 
on 26 March 2010
flights to Australia, flights to New York, cheap flights
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1260008/Australia-tests-hypersonic-flights-3-hour-Europe-commute.html#ixzz0jIMh6j98
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