A New, Chinese Airplane Design Could Reach Blazing Mach 5 Speeds: "Building a useful plane that's faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, is a difficult engineering challenge, but a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a plan to pull it off.
The trick to making these faster-than-Mach 5, or hypersonic, vehicles is to build a "waverider"-shaped airframe and top it off with a "high-pressure capture wing," the researchers wrote in a December 2017 letter to the journal Science China. Waveriders are aircraft bodies shaped to skim along the top of the pressure wave created by their own supersonic flight — in essence, using the shock wave to increase the plane's lift, or the upward force that keeps a plane in flight. But the roofs of waveriders can also become "compression surfaces" — planes that surrounding air flows against, pushing the whole vehicle back toward the ground. High-pressure capture wings (HCWs) attached to the top of the plane turn that pressure instead into additional lift." Read More