Supersonic jet engine flight looks like a roaring success

AN international team developing a new type of supersonic jet engine that has the potential to slash air travel times said yesterday that a test flight looked like a success.

Scramjets, also known as supersonic combustion ramjets, can theoretically halve payload weights by only carrying fuel such as liquid hydrogen rather than both the fuel and oxygen carried by traditional rockets. That would significantly cut the cost of launching satellites into space.

Scientists also believe scramjets could one day be used to build aircraft capable of flying from London to Sydney in a few hours, a flight that takes at least 18 hours by passenger jet.

"It will be a couple of weeks to get a realistic first estimate" on the test flight's success, project leader Dr Allan Paull of the University of Queensland, Australia, said. "But it was at least a 95% success."

In yesterday's test at the Woomera rocket-testing range in central Australia, two Terrier Orion Mk-70 rockets blasted the scramjet to an altitude of about 195 miles (314km) before hurtling back to earth.

Just seconds before the rockets slammed into the red dust of the central Australian desert after a scheduled 10-minute flight, the scramjet was supposed to kick into action at a speed of some 5,000 mph, said project spokeswoman Jan King.

"As far as we are aware, we certainly got in the right trajectory," said Paull.

On-board sensors sent flight data back to the researchers on the ground.

"We got everything we wanted, we've just got to analyse the data now but it all seemed to basically work," an excited Paull said.

He said researchers would probably take up to two weeks analysing data before establishing whether the scramjet worked as they had hoped.

The international consortium launched a test in October but it failed when a rocket carrying the experimental jet veered off course and slammed into the desert.

In a scramjet, oxygen from the atmosphere is rammed into the combustion chamber where it spontaneously ignites, but the engine must travel at about five times the speed of sound for the process to work. Sound travels at 744 mph at sea level.