Unless you are a billionaire playboy or a business magnet of some sort, odds are you fly Coach like the rest of us when you travel by air. For the well-heeled, it’s First Class all the way, but for the really rich it’s private jets. A company called Spike Aerospace has a new private jet in the design phase it claims will be the fastest private aircraft in the skies – assuming it launches in 2018 as planned.
The 18-passenger aircraft is called the Spike S-512 and it will have a cruising speed of Mach 1.6. That makes it about twice as fast as a commercial aircraft. The company says a trip to London from New York would take three to four hours in its jet.
One of the biggest challenges to building the aircraft is dealing with the sonic boom when flying over populated areas. The FAA has regulations for sonic booms and those regulations are what greatly limited the usefulness of the Concorde jet when it was in service.
The 131-foot-long aircraft is expected to have a maximum flying range of 4,000 nautical miles, and will between $60 million to $80 million when it launches.
[via GizMag]
