Shown here in Canadian CP Air insignia, the McDonnell Douglas DC-2000 represents the views of one of the world's greatest airliner design teams on the possible configuration of an end-of-the-century 6,000mph commercial jet.
Not sharing Lockheed's immediate, acute worries, McDonnell Douglas continues to think far ahead, into the 'eighties and even to
the end of the century. While Boeing still hankers for a huge, Mach 3 successor to its long-abandoned SST, Douglas
believes that America's first step into commercial supersonics should be with an aircraft looking very like Con corde, made of the same conventional materials and flying in the same speed range, but carrying twice as many people. Beyond that its engineers visualise an end-of-century DC-2000, powered by four liquid-hydrogen ramjets, that will carry 500 passengers up to 7,500 miles non-stop at 6,000mph. Australia in under three hours from London might seem like science-fiction but, personally, the writer never scoffs at anything with a ''DC'' prefix.
Aircraft Yearbook 1974 edited by John W.R. Taylor
