A journey that once would have taken six weeks by fast ship now takes less than 30 hours by airplane. Concorde indeed halves the time that it takes to fly between London or Paris and New York. Yet nowadays we still tend to fret at the amount of time we have to buckle into airline seats. Only sixty years on, it is now hard to imagine how people coped with several days or weeks on an ocean liner, when these were the only affordable and feasible mode of international travel.
Even though there has never yet been a technological discovery that did not in the end become an economic proposition, it has been the received wisdom that hypersonic passenger travel will never happen because of the horrendous developmental expense involved. Now, however NASA, which in terms of high-speed flight, sits at the technological cutting edge, has revealed tests it is conducting on a craft known only as the X-34A, which is designed to fly at no less than ten times the speed of sound. This is not however a rocket-powered craft. It uses a new type of jet engine which works on what NASA has called inelegantly the Scramjet system. This engine is fueled by hydrogen which it combusts with oxygen taken from the atmosphere.
Flying at 7,200 miles an hour, a Scramjet could turn the flight between New York and London into a 45-minute trip. The four prototypes on which these engines are being tested are all pilotless. Just how advanced remote control technology has become was demonstrated earlier this week when a new Global Hawk spy plane made an 8,600-mile trip from its base in California to an airfield in southern Australia. This was the longest ever robot flight. Like the Cruise missiles, whose guidance technology has been developed for the Global Hawk, this aircraft works off pre-set courses but uses powerful computers to adjust for weather and winds. The Global Hawk did, in fact, have a pilot, but he was sitting behind a console back in California, merely monitoring the soundness of the decisions that the inboard computers were taking.
This is surely the way the airline industry is going. Already on modern airplanes, the pilot and copilot face a constantly decreasing workload as ever more advanced avionics and controls allow the aircraft to fly itself. As soon as they are sure it is safe enough, airlines will be removing one pilot from the flight deck. The backup pilot will be sitting thousands of miles away, monitoring not just that airplane, but probably half a dozen others. The time may come when even the remaining pilot will be done away with.
However, there is perhaps a risk which continues to threaten the whole future of airline travel. Far from traveling between London and New York in 45 minutes, most executives could already be making the trip in a fraction of a second. Broad-band telecommunications have made teleconferencing an almost standard tool. Ever smarter technology will add to the reality of these contacts. Ten years on, executives scattered around the world could all meet together in the same room. In such circumstances, even 45 minutes in an airplane would seem an age.
It will be a world too smal to travel around in.
