An Atlanta-based startup, Hermeus Corporation says it’s building a hypersonic jet that will travel at four times the speed of sound. If Hermeus is successful, that could reduce TransAtlantic travel times between New York and Paris from 7 ½ hours to just 90 minutes. That’s about twice the speed of the supersonic Concorde. The new Mach 5 airplane is expected to take 10 years to develop but will deliver a range of about 4,600 nm.
Hermeus’ four co-founders, AJ Piplica, Glenn Case, Mike Smayda and Skyler Shuford, previously worked together on hypersonic travel at Generation Orbit where they led the development of the Air Force’s X-60A hypersonic rocket plane. CEO AJ Piplica last week told CNN, “We have a ton of flying to do in that time. We’ll have at least two smaller iterations of aircraft that we’ll build, test, and learn from in that time. The main challenge is integrating the core technologies together and testing them. It’s really difficult to recreate the Mach 5 environment on the ground, which calls for a rethinking of how we develop vehicles that operate in this environment. That means you have to fly. We have to build a lot of hardware and fly it early so we can learn and iterate quickly.”
