The initial observation who laid the foundation of HIKARI was that, even with aviation craving for growth and disruptive progress and so many research initiatives in high speed transport, passengers traveling routinely onboard a high speed airplane is still a long way ahead. There are two major hindrances to the emergence of this product: the first one are development costs and risks associated to such a program, the second is the technology readiness level of its building bricks.

To reduce risks and share costs, HIKARI federated all the hypersonic initiatives in Europe and Japan to converge on common design goals, and benefit from the huge know-how built over the years by its industrial, research centers and academic partners.

Several vehicle designs from HIKARI “parent-initiatives”

The performed market analysis comforted the ability for this target design to meet the market expectations.
To address the technology readiness issue, HIKARI pursued research in three key critical areas for high speed transport: thermal and energy, propulsion and environment, and derived a joint technology maturation path towards flight experimentations.