China’s Hypersonic Jumbo Aircraft Hits Mach 6 In Test Flight; Can Travel From Beijing To New York In 2 Hours

In a remarkable technological breakthrough, a prototype of a revolutionary hypersonic aircraft developed by China reached the incredible speed of Mach 6 during testing in the Gobi desert.

The hypersonic aircraft with an unusually large or bulky body was launched by Chinese scientists into the sky, achieving a speed that might allow it to travel from Beijing to New York in two hours, South China Morning Post reported. Currently, an average passenger plane takes about 12 to 14 hours to travel 11,000 kilometers between the two cities.

The test was originally conducted by Cui Kai, the project’s leader and a researcher at the Institute of Mechanics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2021, but it was kept under wraps for three years due to technological sensitivity. On December 10, the Chinese Academy of Sciences shared Cui’s remarks and a video of the prototype’s liftoff on Chinese social media.

According to reports, a scaled-down prototype of the aircraft achieved a high speed of Mach 6.56, or more than six times the speed of sound. The SCMP report stated that the test gave early validation to a concept that was considered implausible when it was initially introduced six years ago.

“At the time, everyone thought it was a crazy idea,” Cui Kai was quoted as saying. “We faced almost universal skepticism. Fortunately, we chose to persevere. I always believed that innovation thrives amid doubt.”

The aircraft tested by Cui’s team has a bulky body, a stark departure from slender-body hypersonic aircraft seen in the past. “It features a fat and round fuselage and cape-shaped wings on its back,” notes the report while asserting that the future hypersonic aircraft may be able to transport as much cargo or passengers as current jumbo planes.

The nearly 20-minute test flight ostensibly solved a long-standing problem for aircraft designers: as flying speed increases, the amount of usable space within the cabin diminishes. The report emphasized that because of their extremely constrained interior space, all hypersonic aircraft that can currently reach speeds exceeding Mach 5 are only used for military purposes like missiles and unmanned reconnaissance planes. “At high speeds, the front of a large airframe experiences significant downward pressure, impairing its climbing ability.”

This problem was solved by Cui by adding a broad wing surface above the airframe to convert this downward pressure into upward lift. But even this led to an unheard-of level of complexity in the design. So, Following the concept’s public release in 2018, Cui’s team carried out numerous wind tunnel experiments and further improved the design.

According to Cui, the cost of each test was hundreds of thousands of yuan. The test flight of 2021 was successful because the tests were repeated multiple times to confirm the viability of different models. Cui did not reveal the status of the full-scale construction of the aircraft or the anticipated date of its first flight.

“For such cutting-edge technology, we still face numerous challenges that need to be addressed directly, including issues related to power, materials, and structure,” Cui said. “We have only completed a small fraction of the work and taken a modest step forward.”

Despite a paucity of details, EurAsian Times understands that China has been working on making commercial hypersonic travel a reality for several years.

The SCMP report noted, “The team’s efforts could help revolutionize human transport, turning the concept of “one-hour global travel” from science fiction into reality.”

China’s Quest With Commercial Airliner Technology

There is a fierce race among many nations to develop hypersonic technology. By 2035, China plans to create a small fleet of crewed hypersonic aircraft that can reach any location on Earth in a matter of hours.

In 2018, a Chinese research team claimed to have developed a new design for an extremely fast aircraft that would transport tons of goods and dozens of passengers from Beijing to New York in just two hours. Cui and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing conducted aerodynamics tests for China’s latest hypersonic aircraft prototypes in a wind tunnel using a scaled-down copy of the aircraft.

Later, reports in 2021 indicated China was developing a hypersonic airliner capable of transporting 10 passengers to anywhere in the world in less than an hour. The 148-foot-long (45-meter) plane was reportedly about a third the size of a Boeing 737 and had delta wings identical to Concorde’s (the world’s first supersonic airliner) but with the tips pointed skyward.

The following year, in 2022, reports noted that China had finished the first testing of a small hypersonic prototype aircraft for civilian use in preparation for developing a full-sized hypersonic aircraft that can fly six times the speed of sound.

The prototype was known as Nanqiang No. 1 and was expected to be a model that would be a technology demonstrator for a hypersonic airliner. The report stated that the scientists hoped to conclude the test program and move on to building a flyable prototype by 2025.

China’s nemesis, the United States, is also working on hypersonic aircraft technology. According to some accounts, the US Air Force plans to introduce the SR-72 “Darkstar,” a Lockheed Martin aircraft that is the fastest in the world with a Mach 6.0 speed.

In the late 1950s, American engineers took the lead in investigating the potential of hypersonic technology, including planes and missiles, marking the beginning of hypersonic research. The ambitious X-15 program saw the US military launch manned hypersonic test aircraft. However, once the United States got involved in the Vietnam War in 1968, the program’s encouraging advancements were halted.

Since hypersonic aircraft were thought to be less applicable to the unique requirements of combating rebels in jungle terrain, the focus switched away from them. The United States later shifted its attention to international counterterrorism efforts.

On the other hand, China, stepped up its efforts to build hypersonic weapons and aircraft and carried out regular flight tests. In fact, Beijing frequently made use of publicly accessible American hypersonic research that had been supported over many years by the US government. And if the new claims are to be believed, Beijing appears to have come very far with the hypersonic aircraft development—much farther than the West may have previously anticipated.