Hypersonic Hydrogen Aircraft – Destinus

Subtitle: The future of air travel – reach the other side of the world, sustainably, within 4 hours Destinus is an organisation focusing on creating hypersonic air travel, which is five times the speed of sound, not just supersonic. That is travelling across the world sustainably in as little as four to five hours. They are a young startup company founded only two years ago. Destinus is already working in four countries in Europe; Switzerland, Spain, France and Germany. Bios:Bart Van Hove is the Head of Advanced Studies at Destinus. He studied mechanical and aerospace engineering. He became interested in hypersonics and fluid dynamics at the von Karman Institute, where he worked on hypersonic aerodynamic wind tunnels. He did his PhD on Mars atmospheric entry capsules and has been fascinated by astronomy and science from an early age. Destinus is as close to space as you can reasonably fly on Earth, in the stratosphere at Mach 5. While that’s slow for a planetary lander, it’s insanely fast for a passenger aircraft. Bart likes to work on difficult problems with interesting people. Philip Silva is a Mechanical Design Engineer for Destinus. He has worked on cutting-edge technologies at the CERN particle physics experiments, the ITER fusion reaction, and has been involved in numerous hydrogen technology projects involving cryogenics and fuel cells. He is responsible for hydrogen business development at Destinus, including mobility and energy generation.
 3.00 - Key learnings from the test flights:The test flights now are subsonic so the aircraft are relatively basic, but they have some special features you don't see in any other plane. There are many things we want to learn about, and one of them is the shape of the aircraft. They are very aggressively shaped to be hypersonic, even though today they fly subsonic. 4.30 - Subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic:Subsonic is under the speed of sound, supersonic is at the rate of sound, and hypersonic is classified as five times the speed of sound. 5.20 - Overview of Destinus’s GoalsWe want to make commercial hypersonic flight real. We want to go a lot faster than Concorde. And we want to make the world like a smaller place where we can go anywhere in less than 2-3 hours.  6.00 – Is Destinus focussed on specific uses vs revolutionising air transport as a wholeIf you look at hydrogen in aviation today, it is usually focused on fuel cells, which is good for short, maybe medium-range travel. We’re working on combustion, and a lot faster. What we are working on is flying to the other side of the world and coming back on the same day. So that means no jet lag and a completely different way in which people will travel. 7 - Amount of fuel to have to keep on boardWe're talking about several tons of fuel, which is not crazy in itself, but the volume of hydrogen is very large because the density is low. You have to store this hydrogen in a liquid form, which means it has to be cryogenic, very cold. That's one of the main challenges with these aircraft. 8 - The challenges, when you fly hypersonic compared to supersonic & refuellingWe are very heavily involved in the refuelling and the ground infrastructure. We have recently created a consortium to create infrastructure in an airport in France. 9.30 - Changes required when this comes to fruitionThe aircraft are designed to operate at airports and they have to operate in airspace together with classical planes. That reality means we need to be compatible with the airports and beyond the fuel infrastructure and use the runways that exist. 10.30 - Safety aspects of havi