BRITAIN is leading plans to build a hypersonic plane that could fly on the edge of space and travel from London to New York City in 60 minutes.

With a breakthrough design and cutting-edge technology, “The Sabre” will be able to fly at a speed of Mach 5 (4000mph) – which is five times the speed of sound.

And engineers are inching closer to putting the state-of-the-art machine in the skies – which could happen as early as 2031.

The £6million plan to develop the jet of the future is called Invictus, which is being led by UK-based Frazer-Nash consultants.

Plans launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) are to develop a fully reusable experimental aircraft that can fly at sustained hypersonic speeds.

It will fly on the edge of space and will also have horizontal takeoff capabilities.

This means that flying time from London to New York will be slashed from seven hours to just 60 minutes.

The Invictus testing vehicle will be upgradable, allowing for the exchange of materials, software and propulsion systems between flight test campaigns.

At the centre of the futuristic technology is a pre-cooler system, which has been tested for the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (Sabre).

Sabre engines combine aspects of jet and rocket propulsion and can pull oxygen out of the air during flight at lower levels of Earth’s atmosphere, increasing efficiency.

While flying at speeds such as Mach 5, overheating and air friction are the main problems.

Pre-cooler systems solve this problem, cooling “the air before it reaches the engine, allowing conventional aircraft engines to travel at hypersonic speeds,” Frazer-Nash said in a statement.

It is understood that over the next 12 months, the highly-skilled team at Invictus will finish the concept design and develop a full flight system for the aircraft to fly by 2031.

Sarah Wilkes, chief at Frazer-Nash said: “INVICTUS is an exciting opportunity to provide advanced technology for space and advanced capabilities in defence.

“With strong industry support and deep engineering and aerospace expertise, including Frazer-Nash colleagues with a decade of propulsion experience, we have all the right ingredients to make this ambitious vision a reality.”

Tony Forsythe, Head of Space Technology at the UK Space Agency, added: “This exciting project, made possible by our investments in the European Space Agency, has significant potential to build on advanced cooling and hypersonic propulsion technology developed by UK engineers over many years.”

Meanwhile, a hypersonic passenger jet which could take travelers from London to New York City in just one hour is set to arrive as “as soon as the 2030s”.

The Venus Stargazer is being developed by Venus Aerospace who revealed that it was planning a flight demo “later this summer”.

The company said that thanks to a Nasa-funded breakthrough, the “record-setting” engine system is nearly ready to try out for real.

Venus hopes that its rocket engine will be able to blast passengers around the Earth in record time.

“Stargazer M4 is Earth’s first hypersonic, reusable aircraft,” Venus Aerospace boasted.

“No one has ever built a hypersonic platform that makes two-hour global transport cost-effective. Until now.

Meanwhile, a massive plane dubbed the ‘Skytanic’ is set to take to the skies by 2030.

The US is reportedly planning for a ‘Son of Blackbird’ jet that could become the world’s fastest plane.

And another hypersonic jet could whisk passengers from London to Sydney in just two hours.