There could be a supersonic Air Force One prototype airplane as early as 2025
The Exosonic's 70-seater boasts a 5,000-nautical-mile range and, thanks to boom-softening techniques, it should be able to fly overland at almost twice the speed of sound without upsetting residents down below.
So what kind of speeds are we talking? Well, Mach 1.8 is around 1,381 miles per hour and so Exosonic's craft promises to halve cruise times compared to existing aircraft. "At Hermeus, we are looking to build high-speed aircraft faster and cheaper than has ever been done," Skyler Shuford, Hermeus co-founder and chief operating officer, tells CNN Travel."We built a Mach 5 engine prototype in only nine months and for less than two million dollars."
While the contracts are a big leap forward for Exosonic and Hermeus, Paul Bruce, senior lecturer in the Aeronautics Department at Imperial College London, sounded a note of caution when CNN spoke to him about the Hermeus project in 2019. "The bigger issue is the financial and perhaps the environmental issue; flying that fast will burn an awful lot of fuel, and will be much more inefficient than flying slowly. But if there is a market for it, I don't have any doubt that we could build one of these types of planes."Music mogul and entrepreneur Kanye West famously pitched the Apple-backed iPlane-1 to Donald Trump in 2018, as a hydrogen-powered alternative to the current Air Force One.
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