Canadian Charles Bombardier's newest jet design boasts the ability to take passengers from New York to London in just minutes.
As conceived, the just named 'The Antipode' would be 12 times as fast as the Concorde and can reach speeds up to mach 24, according to the Daily Mail. The plane can carry up to 10 passengers and takes less than an hour to travel over 12,000 miles.
"I wanted to create an aircraft concept capable of reaching its antipode, or diametrical opposite, as fast as possible," Bombardier said.
The machine would need to be built using heat and pressure-proof materials. "LPM could help reduce heat, but it would not eliminate all of it, even if it's working in perfect flight conditions," he explained.
Thanks to rocket boosters on its wings the Antipode would be able to turn any airfield into a flying strip, Forbes reports. At 40,000 feet the accelerators would fall off the plane and return to base. The jet would use a magnetic field to push it along two conductive railings. The rockets would then fire, pushing it further into the air. Then, scramjet engines would propel the jet even further – 10 times the speed of sound, The Mirror explains.
It would take the airplane just 32 minutes to fly from New York to Sydney, Australia and 11 minutes from New York to London.
One of the drawbacks to the design, according to Bombardier, is developing a stable and reliable scramjet engine. There would also need to be a plan to deal with the g-forces passengers would experience.
For now, the plane is just in the concept stage, so it will take a few years to build a prototype.
