Plan on a supersonic airliner

A British company claims to have designed a super-light aircraft that could fly from Europe to Australia in less than five hours. The A2 was designed by Reaction Engines in Oxfordshire and can carry up to 300 passengers at 4,000 mph.

The aircraft is still in its infancy and can operate for 25 years. A2 can maintain a velocity of 3,800 mph, twice the speed of the Concorde. With a length of about 143 meters, the A2 is almost twice the size of the largest jet today. It is powered by Reaction Engines developed hydrogen, located in Culham near Abingdon.

The first manned object to reach supersonic speed was the US ' Bumper ' missile, assembled from a German V-2 missile collected in 1949.

All the astronauts reached the supersonic velocity when they entered the atmosphere as they arrived and returned from orbit. However, the current study focuses on manned space that maintains a supersonic speed in the Earth's atmosphere, something that has never been achieved before.