Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber 319
derekmead writes "Hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force's most recent failed test of an unmanned hypersonic vehicle, Russia now says it wants to jump into the hypersonic game with a long-range bomber. Will Russia's newest Bear fly at 4,500 miles an hour? The Russian military sure hopes so. 'I think we need to go down the route of hypersonic technology and we are moving in that direction and are not falling behind the Americans,' Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Russian television. 'The question is will we copy the Americans' 40-year experience and create a [Northrop] B-2 analog or will we go down a new, ultramodern technology route, looking to the horizon, and create a machine able to penetrate air defenses and carry out a strike on any aggressor.' The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds."
Re:Back to the Future... (Score:5, Informative)
Except for being the wrong plane for the job.
It is a surveillance plane, not a bomber and not a fighter.
It takes pictures and goes fast and there is no room for carrying ordnance. It can't even take off with it's fuel tanks full.
Re:Just what the world needs (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie [wikipedia.org]
Operational but not deployed.
Re:Just what the world needs (Score:5, Informative)
Hypersonic is Mach 5+.
Re:Didn't we go through this fast-bomber thing? (Score:5, Informative)
There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.
Re:Cheapter and easier (Score:0, Informative)
You do know that this is what ICBMs do now, right? They boost in to orbit and then make a guided decent to their target. That B stands for ballistic.
You might remember all the talk about anti-missile technology catching the ICBMs during their "boost" phase when they make their slower, easier to find (Big hot rocket trail you know) powered ascent to orbit. Once they've started to fall back to earth you're essentially screwed. We don't have anything that can catch or hit them.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Fifteen!? Luxury! From the UK you're looking at about 24 hours *flying* time, ignoring any time on the ground when you stop over somewhere in the middle. It's a good job I enjoy reading on flights :) Faster planes would be good... faster and more efficient planes would be amazing!
15 hours for a non-stop flight. Looking it up, it would appear the longest flight time for a commercial flight is 18 hours 50 minutes, from New York to Singapore.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
I recently read that the Concorde, while taxiing into takeoff position, used as much fuel as a modern airliner uses getting all the way to its destination
That says more about the reliability of your reading material than the fuel efficiency of the Concorde. It's incorrect by three orders of magnitude.
A 777 uses ~120000kg of fuel for a transatlantic flight. A Concorde uses ~80000kg for the same flight, and ~200kg to taxi into takeoff position.
Re: Good (Score:3, Informative)
He read that on /. a few weeks ago, and a number of us dug into the details. It turns out to come from the BBC, and is a heavily-rounded, but essentially correct, comparison of the Concorde's taxi allowance to some 737 flavor on one of the shortest scheduled airline flights (just across the English Channel, IIRC), asphalt-to-asphalt.
Of course, the short hop is carrying enough fuel for the hop (plus a bit for diversion, etc.), while the Concorde is lugging fuel for an entire Atlantic crossing, so the roughly comparable passenger load didn't mean as much as we were meant to think.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that engine design improvements for airliners over the past fifty years have been aimed at subsonic flight regimes producing the modern high-ratio bypass turbofans where the core jet turbine only produces 15-20% of the direct thrust and the fan produces most of the "push". Sadly fans don't work in supersonic regimes although if some aerodynamic Einstein ever comes up with a solution then the world will beat a path to her door.
That restricts supersonic flight to rockets, scramjets etc. and to pure jet engines with variable intake nacelle structures that can slow the incoming air to subsonic speeds so it can be compressed, burned and turned into thrust. The Olympus 593s that powered the Concordes are fifty-year-old designs. Modern engines with similar capabilities are a bit smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient but they are not even twice as efficient as the originals.
Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it was a victim of bad timing more than anything. It had a design flaw resulting in the famous Flight 4590 crash, and the fleet was grounded while a fix was developed. They got it turned around and started modifying the planes and resumed service right after 9/11 -- when the airline industry went into a multi-year slump. Ongoing operations barely broke even, but upcoming maintenance would have been a loss, so the programme got the axe.
The thing that really would have made the Concorde really successful, instead of turning a small operating profit but never recouping drvelopment, was more planes -- the design had already been revised, and further production would have had significantly extended range, allowing more routes to be serviced. (Naturally, the longer the route, the more customers will be willing to pay to shorten it.) The profits from this might have permitted a whole new follow-up aircraft with transpacific capability, which is the real SST moneymaker, and with China's rise as an economic power would only have become more lucrative.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Concorde as a plane made a profit. As an aircraft model, it did not. The problem was its huge operating cost for a trans-Atlantic flight (somewhere between $1500-$2500 per passenger - if the crash hadn't killed it, the spike in fuel prices in 2007-2008 would have). That meant your clientele were only a thin sliver of the overall market, and most of them were concentrated on a few routes (between major economic centers, or an economic center and major resort destination). On top of that, a few planes completely saturated your market on a route. That's fine if you're the only carrier which flies the plane on one of those golden routes. But if you were hoping to sell hundreds of the planes to recoup the billions of pounds/francs spent developing the aircraft, you're totally screwed.
Yeah if you got one of the $100 HP Touchpads during its closeout sale, it was hugely profitable for you. But the fact that HP never recouped its huge investment in developing the device means it was a financial failure.
Concorde seat width was 17.8". Most economy class seats [seatguru.com] are 17"-18". Seat pitch was 37" which is slightly better than the 31"-34" norm for economy, but not by much. You basically paid first class price for an economy-plus class seat. But the service, speed, and experience were top-notch. I'm sad I never got a chance to fly it, but don't kid yourself - it simply wasn't economically competitive with regular air travel.
Re:Just what the world needs (Score:4, Informative)
Operational but not deployed.
Retired and not operational.