Our first thought: take all our money.
Not only does this plane claim to get you from New York to Hong Kong in under an hour, it’s also supposed to get you from New York to London in 27 minutes. But the guys behind ‘Skreemr’, industrial designers Charles Bombardier and Ray Mattison, think they’ve got this one in the bag. They’re calling this new-age mode of super transportation a “traincraft” for now, and this is how it works:
Once taken off, the hovering locomotive will morph into a jet when it reaches the sea, which employs an electric-powered magnetic railgun system and hydrogen-fueled rockets so it can travel at incredible speed. That is, 7,672 miles per hour — almost six times faster than a regular aircraft! The vehicle would also fly higher than a commercial aircraft, somewhere at an altitude between 40,000 to 60,000 feet.
Skreemr gets its inspiration from (did you guess?) the bullet trains in Japan. Its name on the other hand, is derived from the sound its shockwave would create, merged with the word “banshee”. The supersonic craft really does sound like a screamer.
But sadly, we won’t be taking flying to New York to Hong Kong ( just imagine — NY bagels in the morning and dim sum lunch) anytime soon.
Left on his to-do list is determining the craft’s shape that can combat the mad force of acceleration fliers would experience, and designing a completely resilient engine. “I am also not sure the materials able to withstand the heat, pressure, and structural stress for this application have been invented yet,” he confesses.
So why get our hopes up? “This concept is first and foremost a way to make people dream about what lies ahead in terms of air travel—to ignite imaginations,” he explains. “I don’t think the Skreemr will be developed in our lifetime, but in the future, who knows?”
But we’ll take a vacation now anyway.
