Japan asked on 'Son of Concorde'

EUROPEAN aerospace group Eads is pressing Japanese companies to join a study to develop a 'Son of Concorde' supersonic aircraft.

'The idea of a replacement for Concorde has never gone out of our minds,' said Eads spokesman Rainer Oller in Munich. 'What is new is that we are saying we want the Japanese to work with us on it.'

Eads is the controlling 80% shareholder in Airbus Industrie, the Toulouse-based successor business to the Anglo-French collaboration that built Concorde.

British Airways and Air France, the operators of the world's only supersonic transport, halted commercial operations of the ageing Concorde fleet last month.

Airbus, 20% owned by Britain's BAE Systems, would be the European partner in any programme to replace the much-admired jet.

Oller said Airbus engineers had continued to look at the technologies for a Concorde replacement in their basic research. And after a visit to Japan to promote industrial collaboration earlier this month, Eads co-chief executive Philippe Camus said: 'There will be a successor to Concorde.'

He said the aircraft would fly faster, further and more quietly than Concorde, and be 'capable of serving cross-Pacific destinations and flying between Europe and Japan'.

Rolls-Royce and US groups General Electric and Pratt & Witney are collaborating on a Japanese-led project scheduled for completion next spring.

Japan is also funding a programme to develop an engine capable of propelling a plane from Tokyo to London in two hours by 2020.

Boeing's plan for a subsonic aircraft capable of flying from London to New York in five hours was scrapped after it failed to win support in the aftermath of 9/11. But Boeing has launched a five-year probe with US space agency Nasa into the possibilities of hypersonic travel - five times the speed of sound.