Fly in QUEST for an Hour btw New York & London...

In late September, a secretive experimental vehicle roared into the clear blue skies above a military base deep within the Arctic Circle in Norway. As the sleek, rocket approached its target altitude of 350km (218 miles), it began to arc back to earth, gradually accelerating to so-called hypersonic speeds of up to Mach 8 – about 9,800km/h (6,100 mph).

The test was the fifth...

of nine planned launches for the Hifire vehicle, which its backers claim  “could be a major step forward in the quest for hypersonic flight”, generally regarded as Mach 5 and above. At these speeds, headline writers like to say, we could soon be zipping from London to New York in just one hour.

It is a promise that is often repeated about Hifire and other vehicles, such as the experimental US Air Force X-51A WaveRider, that had its latest (unsuccessful) test in August. Yet, delve back in history, you find similar promises.

In the pages of popular books, magazines and newspaper comics, the hyperfast world of airline travel was predicted to be just over the horizon. There was seemingly no limit to humanity’s capability to zip about the globe with increasing speed. In his 1965 book Supersonic Transport, Irwin Stambler charts the progression of time it took to cross the Atlantic in history: from 350 hours on wooden ships to 120 hours on steam ships to 60 hours in dirigibles to 12 hours prop planes to 6 hours in planes of the very near future. The graph continues and projects forward to when the one hour barrier would be passed.

It was written at a time when air travel was emerging as a reasonably affordable option for many middle class people and there was reason to be optimistic that not only would prices continue to fall, but jets would continue to get faster.