Since Concorde last took off, supersonic flights have been reduced to the military sphere. The most glamorous passenger plane that has ever existed made its last flight on November 26, 2003. British Airways operated a scenic flight between London Heathrow Airport and Bristol Airfield (United Kingdom), ending a period of 27 years that marked the history of aviation.
The beginning of the end for Concorde dates back to July 25, 2000 when an Air France aircraft suffered a tragic accident after taking off from Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport. All 109 people on board, including passengers and crew, died, as well as four civilians on the ground. Since then, the safety and viability of Concorde operations were compromised and supersonic flights entered into crisis.
Two decades after the last flight of the Concorde, the aeronautical industry has reopened the way to build an airplane that is capable of uniting two continents, such as Europe and America, in record time. However, now it is no longer a question of repeating the supersonic flights of the curved-nose aircraft but of going a little further with hypersonic flights.
Hermeus, a company born in the United States in 2018, is developing a range of aircraft capable of reaching speeds of up to 6,000 km/h. The first of these hypersonic aircraft is called Quarterhorse, with which Hermeus intends to demonstrate that its turbine-based combined cycle engine can switch from turbojet mode to stratojet mode in flight.
The Quarterhorse MK 0 is the test bed, from which Hermeus will test the manufacturing process of its range of hypersonic aircraft. The Quarterhorse family is made up of the MK 1, with which the North American company's engineers will carry out the first flight; the MK 2, with which they will test hypersonic flight; and the MK 3, which is destined to become the fastest plane in the world.
The latest version of the Quarterhorse will reach 5,000 km/h - four times the speed of sound - at an altitude of 24,000 meters with a range of 830 kilometers.
The roadmap designed by those responsible for the aeronautical company contemplates the experimentation of hypersonic flights through Quarterhorse aircraft as a prior step to the construction of a large commercial aircraft with capacity for 125 passengers. This is the Halcyon, a specimen specially designed to cover transoceanic routes at hypersonic speed.
The Halcyon will be prepared to travel at a speed of 6,000 km/h, five times the speed of sound, with which it will be able to cover the distance between Madrid and New York in just 90 minutes, the regulation time of a soccer match. Importantly, flights between Paris and New York operated by Concorde lasted 3 and a half hours, compared to the approximately 8 hours and 30 minutes required today.
The new hypersonic commercial aircraft could see the light of day at the beginning of the next decade. However, at the end of this decade, Hermeus is expected to experiment with a reduced version of the Halcyon, with capacity for only 20 passengers, made primarily of a titanium alloy.
The flight will take place at an altitude of approximately 27,000 meters, and the aircraft will be prepared to fly without refueling for about 8,500 kilometers, that is, more than 2,000 kilometers more than the distance that separates Madrid and New York.
Likewise, Hermeus plans to launch a hypersonic drone called Darkhorse in the near future, which has been designed to carry out missions related to defense and intelligence collection.
