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The History Of The Military Jet During The Twentieth Century, From Its Earliest Designs Of England's Frank Whittle And Germany's Hans Von Ohain On The Eve Of World War II To The Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics YF-22 At The Century's Twilight, And All The Significant Developments And Planes In-Between, As Seen Through Stunning Color And Black And White Archival Films From The Factory, Out In The Field And Up In The Battlefield Skies! An Hour Of Historical Military Aviation High Adventure, Presented In The Highest DVD Quality MPG Video Format Of 9.1 MBPS As An MP4 Video Download Or Archival Quality All Regions Format DVD! (Color, 1993, 48 Minutes.)
A Jet Aircraft (or simply jet) is an aircraft (nearly always a fixed-wing aircraft) propelled by one or more jet engines. Whereas the engines in propeller-powered aircraft generally achieve their maximum efficiency at much lower speeds and altitudes, jet engines achieve maximum efficiency at speeds close to or even well above the speed of sound. Jet aircraft generally cruise most efficiently at about Mach 0.8 (981 km/h (610 mph)) and at altitudes around 10,000-15,000 m (33,000-49,000 ft) or more. The idea of the jet engine was not new, but the technical problems involved did not begin to be solved until the 1930s. Frank Whittle, an English inventor and RAF officer, began development of a viable jet engine in 1928, and Hans von Ohain in Germany began work independently in the early 1930s. In August 1939 the turbojet powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft, made its first flight. A wide range of different types of jet aircraft exist, both for civilian and military purposes. The Heinkel He 178 was the first aircraft to fly on turbojet power, in August 1939. After the first instance of powered flight, a large number of jet engine designs were suggested. Rene Lorin, Morize, Harris proposed systems for creating a jet efflux. After other jet engines had been run, Romanian inventor Henri Coanda claimed to have built a jet-powered aircraft in 1910, the Coanda-1910. However, to support this claim, he had to make substantial alterations to the drawings which he used to support his subsequently debunked claims. In fact the ducted-fan engine backfired, setting the aircraft on fire before any flights were ever made, and it lacked nearly all of the features necessary for a jet engine - including a lack of fuel injection, and any concern about hot jet efflux being directed at a highly flammable fabric surface. During the 1920s and 1930s a number of approaches were tried. A variety of motorjet, turboprop, pulsejet and rocket powered aircraft were designed. Rocket-engine research was being carried out in Germany and the first aircraft to fly under rocket power was the Lippisch Ente, in 1928. The Ente had previously been flown as a glider. The next year, in 1929, the Opel RAK.1 became the first purpose-built rocket aircraft to fly. The turbojet was invented in the 1930s, independently by Frank Whittle and later Hans von Ohain. The first turbojet aircraft to fly was the Heinkel He 178, on August 27, 1939 in Rostock (Germany), powered by von Ohain's design. This was largely a proof of concept, as the problem of "creep" (metal fatigue caused by the high temperatures within the engine) had not been solved, and the engine quickly burned out. Von Ohain's design, an axial-flow engine, as opposed to Whittle's centrifugal flow engine, was eventually adopted by most manufacturers by the 1950s. The first flight of a jet-propelled aircraft to come to public attention was the Italian Caproni Campini N.1 motorjet prototype which flew on August 27, 1940. It was the first jet aircraft recognised by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (at the time the German He 178 program was still kept secret). Campini began development of the motorjet in 1932; it differed from a true turbojet in that the turbine was driven by a piston engine, rather than combustion of the turbine gases - which was a much more complex solution. The British experimental Gloster E.28/39 first flew on May 15, 1941, powered by Sir Frank Whittle's turbojet. The United States Bell XP-59A flew on October 1, 1942, using two examples of a version of the Whittle engine built by General Electric. The Meteor was the first production jet, with the first orders for production examples being made on 8 August 1941, the prototype first flying on 5 March 1943 and the first production aircraft flying on 12 January 1944, while the first orders for production Me 262 aircraft were not issued until 25 May 1943, and the first production Me 262 did not fly until 28 March 1944 despite the Me 262 program having started earlier than that of the Meteor, as Projekt 1065, with initial plans drawn up by Waldemar Voigt's design team in April 1939. The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the first operational jet fighter, manufactured by Germany during World War II and entering service on 19 April 1944 with Erprobungskommando 262 at Lechfeld just south of Augsburg. An Me 262 scored the first combat victory for a jet fighter on 26 July 1944, the day before the British Gloster Meteor entered operational service. The Me 262 had first flown on April 18, 1941, but mass production did not start until early 1944, with the first squadrons operational that year, too late for any effect on the outcome of the World War II. While only around 15 Meteors were operational during WW2, up to 1,400 Me 262 were produced, with 300 entering combat. Only the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet was a faster operational aircraft during the war. Around this time, mid 1944, the United Kingdom's Meteor was being used for defence of the UK against the V-1 flying bomb - the V-1 itself a pulsejet-powered aircraft and direct ancestor of the cruise missile - and then ground-attack operations over Europe in the last months of the war. In 1944 Germany introduced the Arado Ar 234 jet reconnaissance and bomber aircraft into service, though chiefly used in the former role, with the Heinkel He 162 Spatz single-jet light fighter appearing at the end of 1944. USSR tested its own Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1 in 1942, but the project was scrapped by leader Joseph Stalin in 1945. The Imperial Japanese Navy also developed jet aircraft in 1945, including the Nakajima J9Y Kikka, a modified, and slightly smaller version of the Me 262 that had folding wings. By the end of 1945, the US had introduced their first jet fighter, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star into service and the UK its second fighter design, the de Havilland Vampire. The US introduced the North American B-45 Tornado, their first jet bomber, into service in 1948. It was capable of carrying nuclear weapons, but was used for reconnaissance over Korea. On November 8, 1950, during the Korean War, United States Air Force Lt. Russell J. Brown, flying in an F-80, intercepted two North Korean MiG-15s near the Yalu River and shot them down in the first jet-to-jet dogfight in history. The UK put the English Electric Canberra into service in 1951 as a light bomber. It was designed to fly higher and faster than any interceptor.