A country that has a super fast jet could change the level playing field in air superiority and dominance that is why a first world nation is in the race to develop this type of weapons, a Hypersonic jet that has a speed of Mach-5 or faster.
A recent report from the South China Morning Post, that a hypersonic weapon is now being developed by the Chinese aeronautics and weapons engineers and they are building a wind tunnel in order to test this type of weapons capable to reach and strike the west coast of the United States in 14 minutes.
The report said that the wind tunnel is expected to be completed around 2020. The wind tunnel would be used to test weapons and simulate hypersonic flight at speeds of more than 7 miles per second.
“[The wind tunnel] will boost the engineering application of hypersonic technology, mostly in military sectors, by duplicating the environment of extreme hypersonic flights, so problems can be discovered and solved on the ground,” said Zhao Wei, a deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who is working on the project, according to the report.
Presently, the United States has the world’s most powerful wind tunnel in LENX-X facility located in Buffalo, New York. Wherein, the wind tunnel can operate at speeds of up to about 6 miles per second, which is 30 times the speed of sound.
It is said that the aircraft is flying at Mach 1 if its speed is equal to the speed of sound in air (which is 332 m/s or 1195 km/hr or 717 miles/hour.) and to be called hypersonic, an aircraft must travel at Mach 5 speeds or faster. Which means that a traveling at Mach 5 is five times the speed of sound. “Mach” and “Mach number” refer to the ratio of the speed of a body (aircraft) to the speed of sound in the undisturbed medium through which the body is traveling. -Carl E.