Japan and France to develop Concorde II

JAPAN and France will jointly develop a new supersonic commercial aircraft to succeed the retired Concorde, Japan’s trade ministry has said.

Companies from the two countries will invest €755,000 a year in research over the next three years to build a passenger plane capable of flying faster than the speed of sound, the ministry said in a statement.

The co-operation opens the possibility of halving the flight time between New York and Tokyo to six hours on an aircraft with about three times the capacity of the Concorde with 300 seats, according to Japanese media reports yesterday.