Skreemr, a 75-passenger luxury hybrid concept craft that is designed to travel at 7,672 miles per hour (nearly six times faster than the renowned Concorde) could allow you to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in forty minutes.
The Skreemr is an aircraft concept that is capable of being launched at very high speeds (up to Mach 10) with the help of a magnetic railgun launch system and scramjet engines. The railgun launching system will be designed to achieve supersonic speed without taxing the passengers with too much g-force. Designed by Charles Bombardier and Ray Mattison, the unusual concept involves a floating bullet train morphing into a jet once it reaches the sea, employing the magnetic railgun system and a pair of hydrogen-fueled rockets to fire it into the sky at supersonic speed. With the assistance of the scramjets, the aircraft would be able to fly at an altitude ranging between 40,000 and 60,000 feet, higher than the typical business jetliner.
Bombardier formed the innovative idea of the Skreemr while Mattison, from Design Eye-Q in Minnesota, created the renderings of the concept. Charles Bombardier is an engineer, inventor and angel investor, and has previously worked at Bombardier Inc. and Bombardier Recreational Products. Bombardier has gained recognition from creating his own vehicle designs and publishing them online. Ray Mattison, based in Duluth, Minn, studied at the College for Creative Studies, and he has worked for Cirrus Aircraft and Exodus Machines. Mattison also created the images of the Icarus wingless aircraft and Argentic search and rescue concepts.
While scramjet engines are currently under development in the United States and China, the Skreemr design is purely conceptual as of today, but its functionalities are very detailed. First, the plane would accelerate along a special airstrip by an electromagnetic hurtle. The electromagnetic railguns consist of two conductive rails that can propel a vehicle forward at high speed. Once this launching system gets the plane moving faster, the liquid oxygen and kerosene rockets would ignite and the scramjets would take effect, accelerating the plane through the sky at speeds of up to 10 times the speed of sound. To continue the acceleration, the Skreemr would fire these scramjets advancing the plane into the air at supersonic speed. Finally, the plane’s scramjet engine would ignite, burning up hydrogen and compressed oxygen to propel the plane forward at speeds surpassing Mach 10 (more than 7,600 mph, or 1,220 km/h).
Image Credit: Charles Bombardier