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New York to London in 11 minutes... Cool concept.
Concept Plane Could Travel From New York To London In Eleven Minutes  Charles Bombardier is behind this ambitious and outlandish design he has called “The Antipode.” His concept has room for 10 passengers, who will travel at heights of 12,192 meters (40,000 feet) and speeds of over 20,000 kilometers per hour (12,430 miles per hour). All of this will be powered by reusable liquid-oxygen or kerosene rockets. At these speeds, the plane could travel from New York to Dubai in 22 minutes, New York to Hong Kong in 26 minutes, and New York to Sydney in just 32 minutes. More at the link above. Looks pretty cool to me. Don't know that I'd want to be on the first few hundred flights but still cool. Jan 28 16 11:01 am Link Very cool.. but I have to wonder what kind of acceleration they want to use to get up to 12,000 miles per hour. If they want to keep it around 1 G of acceleration then it would take around 9 minutes to get up to full speed. Then they need to decelerate on the other end. 1 G of acceleration against a nice, comfortable airplane chair should be fine (would feel like lying on your back) but 1G of deceleration would feel like you're hanging from your seat belt from the ceiling. I suppose they could swivel the chairs.. In any case.. the getting up to speed and slowing down again might take longer than the flight itself. Though it would still be *way* faster than a normal airplane. Jan 28 16 11:16 am Link Ah.. ok.. here are some more details from the actual designers: http://imaginactive.org/2016/01/antipode/ fun idea. Jan 28 16 11:23 am Link Peter Claver wrote: "and accelerate up to Mach 24" Jan 28 16 11:31 am Link I have a feeling it will be nothing more than a white elephant because of the cost of operation. Any guesses as to how much tickets on this thing would cost? Jan 28 16 11:34 am Link  11 minute flight, plus 3 hours getting thru security at the airport at each end.... I was ground crew for the current flight record holder, New York to London, ~1 hour and 55 minutes, in 1974. During my time in that program, I met Kelly Johnson, the guy who designed the U-2 and the SR-71. He said at the time that he could go faster, but the cost went up enormously above about Mach 5. Fast forward a few decades, and I imagine it is still true. Jan 28 16 01:04 pm Link Blue Cube Imaging wrote: I doubt it will fly for just carrying 10 passengers. Jan 28 16 01:09 pm Link Peter Claver wrote: I did some math, and while I can't guarantee that it's accurate, my calculations is a person would experience 5g's acceleration until the half way point and then a -5g's deceleration to slow down at the other end. Not terribly comfortable, but then again, you are only uncomfortable for 11 minutes. Jan 28 16 03:24 pm Link Good Egg Productions wrote: physical strain on the passengers, thats what i was thinking! Jan 28 16 03:30 pm Link Good Egg Productions wrote: If they accelerated up to 12000mph in 5.5 minutes (ie. half the flight) then it would be about 1.65G and the same in reverse. Jan 28 16 03:37 pm Link its not a question of if...its just a question of when. it seems like the natural evolution of technology,things get faster. it seems silly beyond belief that when you fly from say the US to europe, you are sitting there for essentially 7 hours. thats ridiculous IMO. Jan 28 16 07:27 pm Link Tony From Syracuse wrote: And yet, 100 years ago (a blink of an eye, really) the trip from the US to Europe took 7 days. Jan 28 16 11:27 pm Link It would not exactly be a comfortable, business-class ride. More like the most terrifying roller coaster ever devised. you would need to be wearing a fighter-pilot style G-suit, oxygen mask because cabin will not be pressurized, and strapped into a fighter-style seat. I don't really see FAA approval forthcoming. I'm really surprised at the altitude - it's very low for this kind of thing. Why not cruise at 80,000 ft where there is much less drag?? Jan 29 16 03:44 am Link highStrangeness wrote: I think the point is that they would cater to those for whom cost hardly matters. Jan 29 16 08:24 am Link Good Egg Productions wrote: I get earaches on a plane during acceleration and deceleration. I couldn't imagine the pain I would be in with this plane. Jan 29 16 08:34 am Link Maddy wrote: its not the acceleration that's giving you the ear aches. It's the change in pressure due to the change in altitude. Planes aren't completely pressurized (for a variety of reasons) so you still feel the change in air pressure as the plane climbs and descends. The pain is due to your inner ear not being able to equalize that pressure. Jan 29 16 08:38 am Link Oddly enough, I've been reading about this sort of thing since I was a child. That would have been more than fifty years ago now. I have to say that over the intervening years the quality of the illustrations has gone downhill somewhat. Jan 29 16 08:57 am Link I think the cruising altitude of the pod would have to be much higher than FL400 (40,000 ft). At that altitude, the air density/resistence would be way too high to achieve speeds on the order of Mach 10. I just looked at an article that does say "40,000 feet" but I think it is talking about the lifting module that gets the pod to an altitude where it separates and then engages the final propulsion system. Jan 29 16 09:43 am Link I think the cruising altitude of the pod would have to be much higher than FL400 (40,000 ft). At that altitude, the air density/resistence would be way too high to achieve speeds on the order of Mach 10. I just looked at an article that does say "40,000 feet" but I think it is talking about the lifting module that gets the pod to an altitude where it separates and then engages the final propulsion system. I agree that its unlikely to happen anytime soon though. The R&D costs manufacturing costs and operational costs involved are probably prohibitive. This is exactly why previous attempts to builf sipersonic business jets have failed. Cool concept but stupidly expensive. Jan 29 16 09:43 am Link MerrillMedia wrote: If you look at the second link that I posted they describe a bit about the aerodynamics they're thinking of: Unlike the Skreemr, the Antipode would be able to take off directly from any airfield by using reusable rocket boosters. These rockets would attach to the wings of the Antipode and provide enough thrust to lift off, climb to 40,000 feet, and reach Mach 5. Emphasis mine. Jan 29 16 09:52 am Link Publicity stunt. A commercial plane of that type is a minimum of 30 years out, from any manufacturer. Bombardier has a new regional jet series they are bringing to market. Just like Boeing with the 747 decades ago, they bet the company on it. (nice plane - fits between turboprops and the 737) They are desperate for sales just as the airliner market hits a slowdown, China enters the market as well and the Brazilian competition is cheaper. Bombardier stock falls below $1 as Airbus inks Iran jet deal http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombard … -1.3423957 Tour of the Bombardier CSeries at the Dubai Airshow http://www.airlinereporter.com/tag/bombardier-cseries/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- edit -- It doesn't matter if Charles doesn't "officially" work for the company any more - he still cares about the family business. The family wealth depends on it. It takes little effort to toss out a couple of drawings and a press release with your name on it.. What does Bill Gates have to do with Microsoft anymore? Does it matter? He still has influence. Why Bill Gates Quit His Job http://www.wired.com/1998/12/gates-5/ "A profound moment in Microsoft history passed last July with barely a media tremor: Bill Gates's de facto retirement from the company's day-to-day business" Why Bill Gates Left Microsoft http://www.informationweek.com/applicat … d/1069287? http://www.cbsnews.com/news/satya-nadel … hair-role/ http://arstechnica.com/information-tech … microsoft/ Jan 29 16 10:11 am Link Michael Bots wrote: Charles Bombardier doesn't work for Bombardier Inc anymore as far as I can tell. And this design was produced by a different company altogether (Imaginactive). Jan 29 16 10:33 am Link screw that. there wouldn't even be enough time to get one scotch down. i'll stick to subsonic transport. i like this idea better. Jan 29 16 10:53 am Link GK photo wrote: Just hold the glass of scotch in front of your mouth right before take off.. Jan 29 16 10:56 am Link Peter Claver wrote: booze balloons. this is date stamped, so therefor is already my ip. Jan 29 16 11:06 am Link Peter Claver wrote: That's not how it works. NY to London is 3459 miles. When you say you can fly it in 11 minutes, you have to get halfway there in 5.5 minutes. Meaning, you have to accelerate to your maximum speed in that time. The AVERAGE speed to do 3459 miles in 0.183 hours, or 11 minutes, is 18,900mph. So you actually have to get to TWICE that fast in the middle if you start from zero and end at zero. To accelerate to 37,800mph in 5.5 minutes, you're going to be extremely uncomfortable. (5.1G) Jan 29 16 09:41 pm Link Good Egg Productions wrote: one could assume the passengers would all be invertebrates. but that would still make it pretty stressful for the crew. Jan 29 16 10:51 pm Link EADS, parent of the Airbus family, unveiled a concept plane in 2011 at the Paris air show. It's called the "Zero Emissions HyperSonic Transport." It's fueled by seawood, pig turds, and fairy flatulence or something. I didn't get the technical details. Anyway, it would have turbofans for takeoff and landing to meet noise requirements. Then a rocket kicks in to take it past turbofan speeds. Then at altitude and speed, the ramjets take over to take it to Mach 4 and rational fuel consumption. Not 11 minutes New York to London but an hour. Two and a half hours, Paris and Tokyo. Pretty good clip. Expected release: 2040 to 2050. Lots of slip possibilities between cup and lip here.  Dreams are nice to have. Jan 30 16 05:35 am Link Some physics if I remember it well, lol. If they say the flight will last 11 minutes then half of that (5.5sec) is required to reach top speed of 20,000Km/hr and that is 330 seconds (5.5*60). 20,000 Km/hr is (20,000*1,000/(60*60)) 5,556 meters/sec. Velocity = Acceleration * Time or Velocity / Time = Acceleration plug in some numbers into my abacus... V = 5,556 meters/sec T = 330 sec a = 16.84 m/sec^2 gravity is 9.8 m/sec^2 therefor 16.84 / 9.8 = 1.72 G's and this is only horizontally. Not very comfortable in my book. If you factor in normal gravity then you get... 19.48 m/sec^2 (Pythagoras) or 1.99 G's total If you had a drink in your hand you would have to tilt it forward to 59.80 degrees. (Trigonometry) That would be weird. Jan 30 16 06:03 am Link Connor Photography wrote: I'm just guessing, guessing mind you, that a similar plane carrying far less than ten "passengers" has been flying for quite some time now. (The SR 71 was retired in 1999). Jan 30 16 06:21 am Link A lot of science-fiction used to talk about high speed tubes (literally mag trains in tunnels that went STRAIGHT through the Earth's crust between major cities (imagine going through the Earth's core in a train doing 500 mph from Tokyo to New York - about half the distance of the current air travel). That idea seems to have dropped out of widespread popularity, probably because dealing with the tectonic plates and lava and the Earth's crust are all a little bit beyond us at this point. Another thing a lot of science-fiction used to talk about was either high-boost rockets (Buenes-Aires to Paris for example) that would be not all that unlike this plane design, except they would boost at high gee into a ballistic course that would allow them to glide or power land at their destination. High gee relatively briefly and only at the front of the trip. The third was doing the high-boost thing, but with ground based power. Basically, a mag-lev ski jump that tossed the vehicle into the ballistic course with power in ground stations - avoiding the need for boosters, rockets, etc. Maybe more environmentally friendly. Someone was surprised that this plane is only intended to go to 40,000 feet and not 80,000. Doesn't surprise me. My guess would be that has to do with issues related to crew and passenger survival. At 80,000 feet, you need a lot more life support - crew garments are effectively space suits. At 40,000 feet? Not much different from what the current requirements are. Jan 30 16 07:19 am Link Al Lock Photography wrote: Good point on the extra cost.. And yeah, 40,000 feet is an everyday thing. Your garden-variety private Cessna Citations fly at 40,000 feet routinely. Jan 30 16 10:31 am Link Al Lock Photography wrote: For a Tokyo to New York route molten rock would be barrier, but this is much less of a problem for coast-to-coast travel within the US. Human travel in a straight line through the Earth isn't a reality yet, but it's really just a matter of scaling up what's already been functioning for decades in the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel Jan 30 16 11:33 am Link of course they could just take my idea and make the flight from the US to london last less than 11 minutes,. people who pay an extra charge are put to sleep....and simply woken up when you get there. for all intent and purpose, to you, the flight lasted seconds. Jan 30 16 01:36 pm Link Al Lock Photography wrote: Maglev trains are expensive. Japan has them, and it costs $100 million per kilometer, and that's just putting it on the surface. You can get a lot faster by using a vacuum tube to eliminate air resistance, but that will also increase costs. Jan 31 16 06:29 pm Link |
