BAC Hydrogen-Powered Aircraft Project

[hesham]

Hi,

here is a hydrogen-powered airliner Project,designed by BAC.

L+K 15/1978

 

[Jargo]

Liquid hydrogen or gas?

 

[martinbayer]

Also seems to claim it's supersonic - I call bogus...

 

[Orionblamblam]

Also seems to claim it's supersonic - I call bogus...

Either the caption writer was smoking something chemcially interesting, or the caption was supposed to go with the image *above* that one. Cuz that design is *firmly* subsonic, certainly not supersonic, and screamingly *NO* on the claimed Mach 3. It might bust Mach 1 in a terminal power dive from high altitde, but it wouldn't hit Mach 3 unless it had an SSME stuffed up it's ass and a suicidal Chuck Yeager at the helm.

 

[martinbayer]

The closest cobbled together online translation of the caption from Czech I could obtain is "A supersonic high-velocity aircraft (M = 3) study with a capacity of 500 passengers from the BAC company", which obviously does not make any real engineering sense in the peculiar combination of basic design parameters to begin with (or make any mention of the use of LH2 as a fuel for that matter), let alone in conjunction with a massively non Whitcomb design. Perhaps hesham can check whether that particular edition of Letectvi + Kosmonautika came out around April 1st, 1978...?

 

[Hood]

Another give away is the Central Airlines livery on that design, a US airline. Incidentally, that helps date the design as Central was merged with Frontier in 1967, so the design must date before that.
Oddly, Central never operated jets, its DC-9s were cancelled on the merger.

 

[Grey Havoc]

So captions were mixed up or someone accidently put in the wrong file image.

 

[Zeppelin]

Where was the Hydrogen to be sourced from back then? presumably from fossil fuel sources?

 

[hesham]

No sign in the text for it.