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sengers can enjoy
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watching the panorama of the Earth on the TV monitor at the
front of the cabin. They will fly so fast that ordinary aircraft windows would
make the structure too weak to withstand the stresses at such a speed. At high
velocities the air resistance in the lower atmosphere is so great that the skin is
heated to very high temperature. The only way out is to fly higher. Therefore,
airliners' routes will mainly lie in the stratosphere.
In general, to build a reliable hypersonic plane one has to overcome a
whole set of technological and scientific difficulties. Apart from creating highly
economical combined engines and heat-insulating materials
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, designers have to
make such an amount of thermodynamic computations that can't be performed
without using supercomputers. One of the ways to make planes as economical as
possible is lightening the aircraft by substituting new composite materials for
conventional metal alloys. Accounting for
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less than 5 per cent of the overall
aircraft weight now, the percentage of composite material parts will exceed 25
per cent in new generation models. An extensive use of new materials combined
with better aerodynamics and engines will allow increasing fuel efficiency by
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