Chinese university becomes first in world to build and test its own hypersonic plane
- Xiamen University’s ‘double waverider’ makes maiden flight in the Gobi, although the ‘game-changing’ technology is usually the preserve of the military
- Academics and students have long-term plan for an aircraft that could travel anywhere in the world in two hours
In a world first, a Chinese university tested a hypersonic plane in the heart of the Gobi on Tuesday morning.
A hypersonic weapon can travel faster than five times the speed of sound, making even the most advanced air defence systems useless, according to Pentagon officials, but the technology is extremely difficult to master and has been guarded in top-secret military research programmes for decades.
However, Xiamen University has now become the first university in the world to have built and flown a hypersonic aircraft – the Jiageng-1 – and to have made its design public.
“We call [the design] the double waverider,” said Zhu Chengxiang, an assistant professor at the university’s School of Aerospace Engineering and a member of the project team.
Unlike other experimental hypersonic vehicles such as Boeing's X-51 Waverider, which rides on an extremely hot layer of gas known as a “shock wave”, the Jiageng-1 rides on two layers of shock waves – one under its belly and the other in the air-inlet duct for its ramjet engine.