Editorial: topical collection on hypersonic flight

The recent resurgence of interest in powered hypersonic flight has thrust our inadequate understanding of many of these phenomena to the fore and motivated renewed interest in the research of high-speed fluid mechanics. Despite the increasing power and sophistication of computational capabilities, experimental investigations remain a crucial tool in furthering our knowledge of this flow regime. This motivated the Editors of Experiments in Fluids (ExiF) to solicit the present topical collection on the science of hypersonic flight, inviting leading experimentalists from across the world to contribute their research. This accompanies a sister collection focusing on theoretical and computational aspects of hypersonic flight in the journal Theoretical and Computational Fluid Mechanics (Theofilis et al. 2022).