A flight from Athens to Sydney currently takes somewhere around 20 hours. Two separate hypersonic programs in Europe are...

A flight from Athens to Sydney currently takes somewhere around 20 hours. Two separate hypersonic programs in Europe are working toward cutting that to a fraction of the time, though neither is close to carrying passengers yet. The European Space Agency is developing a hypersonic research vehicle called Invictus, built by prime contractor Frazer-Nash, designed to fly at more than five times the speed of sound at around 80,000 feet. The design phase wraps up this year, with small-scale engine testing set for 2027. A first flight at lower speed is estimated around 2034, with full-speed hypersonic testing following around 2036. Its initial missions would be launching satellites, not moving people. Frazer-Nash has said the technologies Invictus proves could eventually underpin faster long-haul travel in future commercial aircraft. Gordon Stevenson, a director at Spaceport Machrihanish, one of the testing sites involved, put it bluntly: "You could be in Sydney, Australia in three hours. It depends on the speed at which it flies and the success of the technology, but it would be amazing, wouldn't it?" On the commercial side, Swiss start-up Destinus is developing a hydrogen-powered hypersonic airliner aimed at carrying 400 passengers, targeting a London-Sydney flight time of four hours. The company has already flown a ten-metre prototype called Destinus-3, which takes off on a hydrogen-fed jet engine and switches to a ramjet to hit Mach 5. Commercial service, if the technology holds, would not arrive before the 2040s. ESA's earlier LAPCAT research program set a nearly identical goal years ago, targeting a Brussels-Sydney flight of two to four hours at speeds between Mach 4 and Mach 8. The target has not changed. The timeline to get there just keeps shifting. #Greece #Aviation #Hypersonic