London to NY in 11 minutes by executive jet of the future

A NEW design for a business jet could carry executives from London to New York in 11 minutes, and from New York to Sydney in half an hour.

The Antipode is a 10-seater aircraft that would be able to travel at 12,427 miles per hour, 24 times the speed of sound or 12 times faster than Concorde.

The concept is the latest from Charles Bombardier, the Canadian inventor, and builds on a previous idea, the Skreemr, a passenger jet that would be able to fly at Mach 10.

It incorporates ideas from Joseph Hazeltine, an aerospace engineer at Wyle Laboratories Inc, which works with NASA among others, who suggested incorporating a nozzle on the plane’s nose that would suck in air, creating counter-flowing jets of air over the surface of the plane. This would help cool the aircraft body, which would get extremely hot at a speed almost as fast as re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, and would muffle the sonic boom.

The Antipode would take off using rocket boosters attached to its wings, which would detach at 40,000ft and five times the speed of sound.

An on-board computer would then ignite its supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) engine and accelerate up to full speed.

Several practical problems remain, not least that a scramjet engine has yet to be developed.

And Mr Bombardier expects that each plane could cost well over $150m (£105m) to build.

The Antipode, seen in an artist’s impression, would travel almost as fast as a spacecraft during re-entry, using a counterflow of air across its surfaces to prevent it getting too hot