The Swiss company Destinus plans to create a supersonic aircraft that would one day travel at nearly 20,000 km/h in the highest layers of the atmosphere, fuelled by green hydrogen. This aircraft would be able to transport important cargo halfway around the world in just one and a half hours.
Destinus is developing a “hyperplane” that will fly without pilots at speeds of up to 18,500 kph at an altitude of about 60 kilometers. After the invention of the jet engine and the first passenger aircraft using this novel kind of propulsion, the aviation industry experienced a golden period marked by numerous innovations and accomplishments.
However, the autonomous aircraft will initially only carry up to one ton of freight rather than passengers. You should be able to go from Frankfurt to Tokyo in 1.5 hours using 15 times the speed of sound and an altitude of 60 kilometers, where air resistance is particularly minimal. Sydney ought to be reachable from Germany in less than two hours as well.
But until this occurs, it probably won’t be for a while. Although the business has already created two prototypes of the Hyperplane and launched them into the air, these models were greatly scaled back and only flew for a short period of time to gather data on flight behavior. They were just seven and ten meters in length.
By using green hydrogen to power this engine, only water will escape into the atmosphere. The transportation of donor organs or especially sensitive data could then be areas of application for the hyperplane.
