Secret WW2 Projects | The First U.S. Jet, And The British Engine | Aviation History Documentary
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- Опубликовано: 24 янв 2024
- The origins of the turbojet, a jet power revolution. The History of Sir Frank Whittle's Invention.
With the world at war in June 1942, a short, fussy Englishman checked into downtown Boston’s Hotel Statler and made a peculiar set of demands.
After registering at the front desk (today’s Boston Park Plaza) as “Mr. Whitely,” he demanded a phone installed in his room not connected to the main switchboard. Meals must be served in his room and delivered by the same bellhop. And please, no surprise knocks on the door.
The mysterious little man was actually Frank Whittle, a 34-year-old Royal Air Force (RAF) officer, pilot, and inventor of the jet engine. Earlier in the year, he nearly suffered a nervous breakdown from exhaustion while racing to bring England, under attack from Germany, into the jet age.
Now, for several weeks in 1942, Whittle was secretly involved in bringing GE’s Lynn, Massachusetts, plant, as well as the U.S.A., into the jet age as well. The course of GE’s new aviation enterprise changed forever.
As a young RAF officer in 1930, Whittle filed for the world’s first turbojet patent application. After facing five years of disinterest from the British government, a London investment house bankrolls Whittle’s commercial venture called Power Jets Ltd., and the RAF allows the young flight officer to work part-time on his propulsion experiments. By 1937, Power Jets is running a turbojet in a test cell.
By May 1941, Europe is at war and Whittle’s turbojet powers England’s experimental Gloster E.28/39 aircraft. The month before, General H.H. “Hap” Arnold, Deputy U.S. Army Chief of Staff for Air, had personally reviewed England’s jet propulsion advances, including the Gloster and its Whittle turbojet. Clearly, U.S. aviation was behind.
Arnold initiated a U.S. jet propulsion program and engaged GE to produce America’s first turbojet using Whittle’s design. His selection of GE was based on the company’s innovative impellers, turbines, turbosuperchargers, and compressors, which were developed mostly in GE’s Lynn and Schenectady operations.
In 1942, Donald “Truly” Warner, a top Lynn engineer, led the I-A team to reconfigure Whittle’s design to American production standards with several improvements, including a more robust impeller, an automatic control system, and improved metal alloys for more durable turbine blades.
The GE team had a key advantage: The I-A, a centrifugal flow design with a two-sided impeller, was similar to the innovative GE turbosupercharger boosting the piston engines for thousands of U.S. and Allied aircraft.
The GE Lynn team successfully ran the I-A on April 18, 1942, in a concrete test cell dubbed “Fort Knox.” The test cell, with eighteen-inch walls and a distinctive smokestack, is now a historical monument. The first test run occurred about six months after Lynn received drawings for the upgraded Whittle W.2B - a remarkable and patriotic feat by the team.
Then, in June 1942, Whittle in Lynn arrived to lend a hand. He brought updated turbojet drawings and helped to tackle issues with excessive gas exhaust temperatures. Whittle was accompanied by a small group of English engineers. Their stay in the area was equally clandestine.
After several days in the Hotel Statler, Whittle moves in the dark of night into Marblehead, Massachusetts, home of a GE senior technical leader in Lynn named Reginald Standerwick, a fellow Englishman who joined GE more than 30 years earlier. For several weeks, Whittle will stay in the comfortable two-story house at 17 Brookhouse Drive, which is north of the Lynn plant and a casual walk from the ocean shore.
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General characteristics
Crew: 1
Length: 38 ft 10 in (11.84 m)
Wingspan: 45 ft 6 in (13.87 m)
Height: 12 ft 4 in (3.76 m)
Wing area: 386 sq ft (35.9 m2)
Airfoil: root: NACA 66-014; tip: NACA 66-212
Empty weight: 8,165 lb (3,704 kg)
Gross weight: 11,040 lb (5,008 kg)
Max takeoff weight: 13,700 lb (6,214 kg)
Fuel capacity: 356 US gallons (1,350 l; 296 imp gal)
Powerplant: 2 × General Electric J31-GE-5 centrifugal-flow turbojet engines, 2,000 lbf (8.9 kN) thrust each
Performance
Maximum speed: 413 mph (665 km/h, 359 kn) at 30,000 ft (9,144 m)
Cruise speed: 375 mph (604 km/h, 326 kn)
Range: 375 mi (604 km, 326 nmi)
Ferry range: 950 mi (1,530 km, 830 nmi)
Service ceiling: 46,200 ft (14,100 m)
Time to altitude: 30,000 ft (9,144 m) in 15 minutes 30 seconds
#aircraft #engine #turbojet 
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Is that the same top secret airbase that was burnt down by the bat bombs later in the war ?
It's fantastic having Sir David narrate this fine piece of educational material.
The BBC are obviously not paying him enough.
Attenborough could read off an ingredient list from a cereal box and make it sound excellent!
Sir Frank Whittle , what an eloquent speaker .
The P-59, no matter what flaws it had, look at it. It is such a pretty aircraft. I just love the look to bits. Beautiful, graceful and muscular. Fantastic.
Can't wait to fully digest this one this evening, thanks for the great content!
Thank you for the support
Absoultly absorbing content for me I was always interested in aircraft since I was a boy . Flying never happened for me but that's another story . Thank you for the history lesson .
Many years ago (1964) as an inquisitive lad I asked my Grandmother if I could fiddle with some old clocks she had in a box, fascinated by all those gears and things she explained what bit did what and went on to tell me about her watch repair shop 'Harvers'. I asked what sort of things they fixed and she said all sorts of things then told me about the old boy in the workshop who made clock parts then said 'young Frank would sometime bring in a box of gauges to fix and fittings needing silver soldering or brazing. I asked "who is Frank" she casually replied "oh he's the chap that invented the jet engine' ! . I was too young to appreciate young Franks contribution by I like to think Gran's shop played a little part in the jet's development.
I also didn't know that the nice picture of a plane at my Uncles flat I had scribbled on were in fact GA plans of Mitchell's 'Spitfire' . He also had a nice Balsa plane on his desk that I would zoom around the room with. Yep that was a wind tunnel model of the Spit. My Uncle worked as an Accountant for Supermarine on the Isle of Wight, he died when I was 6 so only found out years later what I was playing with. Thanks for posting this fine documentary.
Thanks for sharing
Their were many new technologies in the package that the British gave to the USA free of charge in early 1940 with the Tizard Missions not just the massive gift of jet engines. The more combat important Cavity Magnetron that created short wave radars allowing fitment of radar on ships and aircraft. Midway in 1942 and other sea battles were won because of this radar and the foresight of Admiral Johnson and long range air navigation systems like 'LORAN' were made possible by the UK's Magnetron. According to James Phinney Baxter III, Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development: "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one cavity magnetron to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores."
In hindsight the gift of jet engines to the USA had zero effect on the the result of WWII especially as the Meteor was far better than anything produced by the USA even up to 1950. And contrary to what was inferred in the video the Meteor was actually the first OPERATIONAL jet fighter in July 1944. BUT it gave the massive manufacturing capabilities of the USA a major advantage post WWII as they only paid licencing fees to manufacture (and then blatantly copy) and not pay the full price of engines built in the UK. Imagine the global market hold the UK would have had into the '50s and '60s.
Yes to some of your argument, but I think that the capture of the 262's and the evaluation of theirs engines (different in basic design ) was the key to modern day fast jet engines?
@@richardraby6266 I would gently suggest not as the French took German engines and tried to make them work to counter the near monopoly of the British designs - both Turbojet and axial flow which had been running for some years by the war's end.
The French were never able to make them work for more than a few hours which was the issue the Germans had had with the 262.
Interestingly neither could the Soviets who also captured Jumo engines so they bought UK built RR Nenes and copied them to great effect.
I wish they'd covered the giving away by the British government of Sir Frank's patent to the Americans. A lot of people in Britain were very unhappy about that.
We have documentaries about Sir Frank Whittle, as well as previously unseen interviews, etc.
You might want to start from here:
ruclips.net/video/G0T4-XG612Q/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/gYmum__jULo/видео.html
And here is PART 1 of his raw interviews, recently ported from film to digital at Pinewood Studios:
ruclips.net/video/crRbwtWquvw/видео.html
This is a G.E. documentary where they celebrate his brilliance:
ruclips.net/video/cOzE5GYhaoU/видео.html
They literally covered it in the beginning of this documentary.
And a lot of Americans were very unhappy about Britain selling them to the Soviets, especially when they reverse engineered them and built the MiG 15.
It encouraged to join the war though.
I'll re-phrase that...a) it encouraged the US to join the war, b) at the time, General Electric had better access to some of the exotic alloys required for the high temperature parts of the engine.
What a marvelous man!
One thing that’s missed from commentaries is any mention of the metallurgy breakthroughs that made these leaps possible.
Biggest problem with the German jets as well .
@@MooreFishing-ky3wq Quite right, it was one of the reasons that Frank Whittle chose a centrifugal compressor for his engine rather than an axial one. At the time a centrifugal type would have been a much easier and affordable solution. He well understood the particular difficulties associated with the power turbine metallurgy, the other key factor in engine power & efficiency, being the temperature at which this can operate.
Excellent
This was the perfect example of the American obsession with over secrecy, compartmentalization, and classifying everything to the detriment of progress. If they had allowed the Bell Corp. access to the wind tunnels early on in the process they may have had a winner of not only the first jet fighter but a tactical superior machine.
I read somewhere, as surprising as it sounds, seventy percent of all printed documents that are generated by the United States government today and classified at some level.
Tex Johnson - if only he knew he’d be barrel rolling jet powered airliners later in his career.
What a fantastic looking plane. Looks really great for the first one.
Anyone going to Lutterworth to see a jet engine in 1937 or 1938 would have been quite disappointed as Power Jets was based in Rugby at the time with the workshop at BTH.
My colleague Ben, his Dad worked power jets, he looks like the grumpy guy with glasses in the Whittle test bed footage, always assumed it was his Dad.
The XP-59’s not too much of a looker, ya?
Sobering to hear that if one person hadnt had defective eyesight we may never have had the jet engine, and we possibly would all be speaking German
Propellers are not obsolete, cfm rise?
Lutterworth is and was then a Town not a village.
Better get in your Time Machine and tell the guy who wrote the script and the V.O. guy of their egregious error.
And in 1937-38, Power Jets was based in Rugby anyway, HQ in Brownsover, test area at BTH. It was moved as the Power Jets BTH site was next to one of the rail lines and BTH and the rail lines were both prime Luftwaffe targets. Also because the early engines tended to have runaway issues which required the BTH drawing office be evacuated each time and it was proving to be disruptive to production of steam turbines.
Is this Richard Harris narrating? Sure sounds like him.
Sir David Attenborough
@@dave_h_8742ah OK thank you!
Why they used a british engine in their projects ? Because they aren't an american jet engine project beiing developed yet...
the obsolete british engines couldbe seen as a revenge for 1776