But as manufacturing techniques evolve
and improve there is still one component
that even the largest aircraft
manufacturers admit is crucial to the
future of the industry
engines
we have ever-more fuel-efficient
aircraft and that counts for the airlines obviously
for the probability of the airlines
which is usually very shallow
It is no
surprise then that
engine industry leaders from GE to
Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney
are all vying for business from plane
manufacturers but the allure of a
multi-million dollar contract has also
attracted some newcomers
looking to propel the industry forward
in some rather
innovative ways
This is Scimitar, a prototype jet
engine from UK-based group Reaction Engines
Its developers say the
experimental apparatus can extend the speed
the power
and the range of existing systems by up
to 5 times the speed of sound
all by tackling the biggest barrier to
a new generation of
ultra-fast aircraft engines:
heat
The fundamentals of jet engine
technology haven't changed much from the
original 1930s design
air is drawn into the front of the jet
where it's compressed
mixed with a fuel like high octane
kerosene and ignited
but in many cases engine temperatures
can reach up to 2,000 degrees Celsius
something which pushes the structural
integrity of the aircraft to its limits
Scimitar is designed to change all of
that
We are in the process of testing a very
very important development in aerospace
propulsion
which is a pre-cooler
a device for
cooling the air entering the high speed
engine so that the engine can continue
to operate pretty much as normal
This means that we're going to be able to fly at speeds of Mach 5
pretty easily in the future 
The company
is now engaged in a fifty-percent
EU-funded project called LAPCAT
Long-term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies
a study designed to examine
the propulsion concepts and technologies
required to create a hypersonic aircraft
with a flight range
near to 20 thousand kilometers
It enables very high speed terrestrial aircraft so for example
a aircraft carrying 300 passengers
could go from Europe to Australia
in about four hours, four and a half hours, 
we're looking at a revolution in transportation equivilant
to the jet engine 
With partnerships to
commercialize the technology
underway the program has even given
birth to a bigger development
a synergistic air-breathing rocket
engine
or SABRE for short
This innovative
concept engine promises to propel the
ultimate flight a single-stage
earth to orbit craft designed for space
travel
But what if heat and fossil fuels could
be removed from an engine's equation altogether?
Researchers from MIT are
working on developing technology
they hope will completely rethink
aviation propulsion altogether
This is an Ion thruster
it might look like something from
science fiction and it's not necessarily
far from it
the thruster operates using a ring of
magnets to electrically charge
atoms within an engine's combustion
chamber propelling the craft forward
but charging these atoms requires large
amounts of electricity
with most organizations considering it
unviable for terrestrial
aircraft until now
In 2013 MIT found
ionic thrusters may be a far more
efficient source of propulsion
than conventional jet engines 
the MIT
team says there's still a lot of work
needed to figure out the best way to
store the voltage
required for ionic thrusters but the
hope is one day
they might just be turning science
fiction into science fact
