An aircraft capable of bombing any target on earth within two hours...

Standard passenger jets travel at around 900 km/h…. could you imagine flying ten times that fast?

You may not have long to wait.  NASA, Boeing and a number of defence organisations have been testing and flying hypersonic aircraft for quite a few years.

On Nov 7, 2007, the US Congress approved the Bush administration’s defence budget for 2008 in which US$ 100 million has been allocated to Project FALCON (Force Application and Launch from the CONtinental United States).

Our friends at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who were responsible for the birth of the internet are also involved with this project. DARPA describes Project Falcon as “…a reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle capable of delivering 5,500 kg of payload a distance of 16,000 km in less than two hours.”

New York to Mumbai, India is 12,500 km. Effectively, the Falcon project is aiming towards developing a bomber quick enough to hit any target on earth within two hours.

If you have missiles, why do you need bombers?

Currently, the US and a very small group of other countries have the capability of producing a ballistic missile which can hit any target on the planet in about 35 minutes. The problem with missiles is that once launched they cannot be recalled, are difficult to re-target and are expensive to maintain.

How fast are the fastest planes now?

One of the speediest and best known faster-than-sound jet aircraft was the Concorde, which was retired simultaneously by both British Airways and Air France in 2003.

The Concorde had a speed of around 2,200 km/h or Mach 1.84

Less well known, but at Mach 2.35 actually faster than the Concorde, was the Soviet built Tupolev Tu-144. ‘Konkordski’, as some called it, only made a few hundred commercial flights.

If speed is your addiction, then only military aircraft will do. However, the fastest of these have vanished as well when they were retired in 1990 - and only a handful of flights made afterwards. The US built Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was a spy plane with an estimated top speed of Mach 3.4 – which still holds the record for a flight between New York and London in 1 hour and 55 minutes.

More about the NASA X-43 and planes faster than Concorde or the Blackbird...