McDonnell Douglas High Speed Civil Transport

The McDonnell Douglas High Speed Civil Transport was a proposed supersonic airliner that never left the drawing board. McDonnell Douglas studied it internally and under NASA contract in 1996, at a time when the company was struggling to compete in the commercial aviation market. The design goals were seats for about 300 passengers over a range of 5,000 nautical miles, cruising between Mach 1.6 and Mach 2.4. The company took part in an international study group on the concept alongside Aerospatiale, Boeing, British Aerospace, Daimler-Benz, Japan Aircraft Industries, Alenia and Tupolev. A first flight was imagined for 2003 and certification for 2005 or 2006, with a forecast market of 500 to 1,500 aircraft, but none were built and it stayed a paper project. A concept illustration shows a long narrow fuselage, four podded engines under sharply raked delta wings and a swept cruciform tail, resembling the cancelled Boeing 2707.