Virgin Galactic debuts design of future Mach 3 high-speed aircraft, signs deal with Rolls-Royce

TechCrunch ^ | August 3, 2020 | Darrell Etherington

[BenLurkin]

Virgin Galactic announced in May that it would be partnering with NASA to work toward high-speed, high altitude point-to-point travel for commercial airline passengers. The plan is to eventually create an aircraft that can fly above 60,000 feet (the cruising altitude of the Concorde) and carry between 9 and 19 people per flight, with a cabin essentially set up to provide each of those passengers with either Business or First Class-style seating and service. One other key element of the design is that it can be powered by next-gen sustainable fuel for more ecological operation.

In some ways, this project has many of the same goals that NASA has with its X-59 Quiet Supersonic research aircraft. Both aim to inspire the industry at large to do more to pursue the development of high-Mach point-to-point travel, and Virgin says that one of its aims is to “act as a catalyst to adoption in the rest of the aviation community” by coming up with baseline “sustainable technologies and techniques.”

Another company working on supersonic flight, Boom Supersonic, is set to unveil and begin testing its XB-1 prototype at an event in October, and also recently announced a new partnership with Rolls-Royce to assist with the design and manufacture of the engines for its eventual Overture commercial plane.

[Getready]

Oooohhhh...pretty good. Pretty good.

[IWONDR]

yes, we were very lucky to have experienced such a trip. it was to attend my sister-in-law’s wedding. we had a very strange experience in the Concorde lounge at Heathrow, when i went up to the desk to ask for a newspaper before our flight home, there were some middle eastern types dressed in their robes who were requesting that they be allowed to get off the flight. i didn’t hear why, but was very concerned that their luggage would still be onboard the flight we were taking, and that my trip of a lifetime gift to my family would end in our deaths because of the bomb i was worried had been concealed in their luggage. fortunately that turned out not to have happened.

the other unusual experience was that as we approached mach 2, the walls of the plane above our overhead luggage compartments started to expand, probably because of the extreme heat being generated as we flew.

[gibsonguy]

It’s interesting that even as far back as the 90’s you/we were worried about bombs in luggage but they still pulled off 911. The PC idiocy of not profiling cost thousands of lives.