International audienceWe investigate the properties of finite energy travelling waves to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with nonzero conditions at infinity for a wide class of nonlinearities. In space dimension two and three we prove that travelling waves converge in the transonic limit (up to rescaling) to ground states of the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation. Our results generalize an earlier result of F. Béthuel, P. Gravejat and J-C. Saut for the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and provide a rigorous proof to a conjecture by C. Jones and P. H. Roberts about the existence of an upper branch of travelling waves in dimension three
