Airbus has patented the design of an airplane of the future that will be able to reach hypersonic speeds and fly from London to New York in an hour and from Paris to San Francisco or Tokio to Los Angeles in just over three hours.
The patent indicates the outlines of an airplane, or actually a vessel, that will be flying close to the boundaries of space while utilising as many as three different kinds of engines. It will take off using conventional turbojet engines, which will later retract into the fuselage, and a rocket engine at the rear, which will provide vertical ascension to a cruising altitude of approximately 30,500 metres. The rocket engine will then shut down and retract into the fuselage, while the ramjet type engines under the wings ignite and use the power of hydrogen to propel the aircraft to its cruising speed of Mach 4.5 towards its destination.
The Airbus jet will therefore greatly exceed the speeds of the fastest passenger airplanes to date, the Franco-British Concorde and the short-lived Soviet Tupolev 144, which were able to reach Mach 2 speeds and never truly established themselves.
In the video below you can take a look at the visualisation of the plane by the YouTube portal Patent Yogi.