China is one of those places that everyone has on their list of pending trips. The culture, the food, the traditions, the color and the mixture of old and modern make it the perfect place for a different vacation, but the mere idea of having to spend 13 hours in a row (and possibly with a child who does not stop crying, screaming and kicking your seat as if your life depended on it) in a metallic tank thousands of feet high, is enough to demotivate us and make us give priority to other places.
The way we travel is evolving and is becoming more efficient, and a new super plane wants to break the 13 hour barrier and take us to China, leaving New York, in TWO hours!
A team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented the first prototype of a hypersonic plane, called I-Plane, which, according to their calculations, could drastically reduce the time we have to spend on an airplane just to get there.
The four-wing aircraft was designed to travel more than 6,000 kilometers per hour (five times faster than the speed of sound, hence the hypersonic) and reduces travel time by up to 80%.
But do not get excited yet, the plane is just in the development stage and, although a scaled version of the plane was already tested in a wind tunnel, no real field test has yet been done.
The good news is that more companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Richard Branson's company, are already experimenting with supersonic aircraft and have plans to start operating them by 2023.
You have plenty of time to save and plan your trip to China, so in the meantime, you can go on small vacations to places a little less distant.
