Airbus just patented a jet that could fly from London to New York in 1 hour (air)

Airbus Group

Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office approved an application from Airbus' Marco Prampolini and Yohann Coraboeuf for an "ultra-rapid air vehicle and related method of aerial locomotion."

In other words, Airbus just patented a hypersonic jet.

Airbus expects the jet to reach speeds as high as Mach 4.5 — or 4 1/2 times the speed of sound.

According to PatentYogi's Deepak Gupta, this means the Airbus jet could make the trip from London to New York in just one hour. That's a significant improvement over the 3 1/2 hours it took for the now retired Mach 2 Concorde to make the same trip. The Concorde was a joint venture between Airbus' two predecessors, France's Aerospatiale and British Aerospace.

The hypersonic jet would also demolish the seven to eight hours it takes a conventional airliner, such as Airbus' own A330, to cross the Atlantic.

In addition, Airbus thinks the patented craft would be able to complete trips like Paris to San Francisco or Tokyo to Los Angeles in just three hours.

Airbus Group

In the patent, Airbus describes the craft as "an air vehicle including a fuselage, a gothic delta wing distributed on either side of the fuselage, and a system of motors able to propel the air vehicle."

The jet is powered by three different types of engines that work in sequential order to get the craft aloft, into cruising altitude, and then up to its cruising speed of more than 3,000 mph.

To get off the ground, the craft will use two turbojets mounted under the fuselage as well as a rocket motor mounted in the rear. As the Airbus lifts off the runway, it will climb vertically like the Space Shuttle. Right before the jet reaches the speed of sound, the turbojets shut down and retract into the belly of plane — leaving only the rocket motor to guide it up to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet.

At cruising altitude, the rocket motor will shut down and retract into the fuselage. Then the plane's pair of wing-mounted ramjets take over and propel the aircraft to a top speed of Mach 4.5.