Its designers say it would take a mere 11 minutes to fly from New York to London, 24 minutes to travel from New York to Shanghai and 32 minutes to get from New York to Sydney.The industrial engineer behind the Antipode is Charles Bombardier, who designed another high-speed aircraft called the Skreemr jet – which was unveiled in October and claims to travel from London to New York in a half an hour.
Bombardier worked on the Antipode design in collaboration with Lunatic Koncepts founder Abhishek Roy.
To achieve speeds past Mach 5, the engineers had to solve the problem of extreme heat from air friction and the massive sonic boom it would create over land. Objects traveling at that speed can reach upwards of 170 F, and there are few materials that can sustain those temperatures.
To combat these effects, the hypersonic jet would use an aerodynamic technique called long penetration mode (LPM) that would channel air flowing over the aircraft, cooling it down and helping to muffle the noise as it breaks the sound barrier.
“I wanted to create an aircraft concept capable of reaching its antipode — or diametrical opposite — as fast as possible,†Bombardier told Forbes.
Right now the design is just that—a design. But Bombardier hopes the aircraft could be used for military or business travelers. Let’s hope it comes with a frequent flier program, because the costs will be out of this world.
NEW DELHI: Charles Bombardier, the man behind the concept aircraft Skreemr which could travel at Mach 10, has now unveiled the Antipode, a hypersonic jet that he claims will cover the distance between London and New York in a mind-boggling 11 minutes.
Bombardier, who is affiliated with the Canadian aircraft company Bombardier Inc, says the Antipode can reach Mach 24, twice the speed of the Skreemr and 12 times faster than the Concorde. In theory, he claims it can carry 10 people for a distance of up to 20,000km in less than an hour.
Last year, the Canadian engineer designed the Skreemr, a four-winged scramjet that he claimed could carry 75 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 10.
One Mach averages 1195km/hour, a speed equal to that of sound. An aircraft flying at Mach 2 is flying at twice the speed of sound, in the air.
On his website, Bombardier says the Antipode can be an ideal business or military aircraft to fly senior officers anywhere in the world in almost no time.
Antipode, he says, will be an aircraft with rocket boosters attached to its wings, which would propel the plane to 40,000 feet and help it reach Mach 5, before they separate and fly back to base.
After that, the supersonic combustion engine will be ignited, shooting the jet up to a speed of Mach 24.
To avoid overheating at such speeds, the jet will use NASA’s Long Penetration Mode concept, by which nozzles on the nose and wings would use the air flowing through to cool down the surface temperature of the plane.
Interestingly, the images of the Antipode concept have been created by Abhishek Roy, the founder of Lunatic Koncepts, a design lab based in India. Roy has also created the renderings for the Subrocket car and the Korbiyor autonomous electric hearse concept.
