The China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics announced that these hypersonic vehicles travel much faster than the speed of sound.
China successfully carried out its first test flight of Starry Sky-2, which is a hypersonic aircraft carrying its own “shock waves”. The test was carried out at a remote location in China’s northwestern region.
The China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics announced that these hypersonic vehicles travel much faster than the speed of sound. Touching the speed of 7,344 km per hour, the aircraft, also called as the “waverider” carries nuclear bombs and has the potential to enter missile defence systems.
The official news agency, Xinhua, said that the waverider "is a hypersonic aircraft that has a wedge-shaped fuselage designed to improve its supersonic lift-to-drag ratio by using the shock waves generated by its own flight as a lighting force".
"The current generation of anti-missile defence systems is mainly designed to intercept cruise and ballistic missiles, which are either slower or easier to predict, making them impossible to intercept. But the trajectory of a waverider is relatively unpredictable in the glide and it flies so fast that it poses an extreme challenge to current anti-missile defence systems," China’s military expert Song Zhongping told Hindustan Times.