90 Minutes from New York to Paris

(Image courtesy PatentYogi via Business Insider)

Actually, make that one hour on a hypersonic jet just patented by Airbus:

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.

The plane would use regular turbojets for takeoff, rocket motors to reach an altitude of 100,000 feet, and then finally ramjets to achieve Mach 4 or faster.

That’s insanely complicated — and if it works, insanely great.