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THE JET ENGINE DroneScapes: The First American Jet Engine. the Hush-Hush Boys | When G.E. Received Frank Whittle's Invention Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOzE5GYhaoU Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
The First American Jet Engine. the Hush-Hush Boys | When G.E. Received Frank Whittle's Invention
DroneScapes
Apr 8, 2023
218K subscribers ... 160,592 views ... 1.4K likes
#aircraft #jetengine #history
A 1952 documentary about the first American jet engine, which was (Sir) Frank Whittle's invention.
In late 1941, when World War II raged all over Europe and Nazi bombers flew over London, a group of GE engineers in Lynn, Massachusetts, received a secret present from His Majesty King George VI, Frank Whittle's jet engine. Stacked inside several crates were parts of the first jet engine successfully built and flown by the Allies. The engineers’ job was to improve the handmade machine, bring it to mass production and help England win the war.
More than a thousand people were working on the project, but few knew what they were building. Joseph Sorota, who became part of the inner circle as employee No. 5. “Our colleagues called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” Sorota recalls.
The jet engine was eventually tested on the Bell XP-59 Airacomet.
The project was so secret that team members had to pick up jackhammers, knock down walls and modify their workshop by themselves. Problems quickly popped up after they unpacked the engine from its box. “We didn’t have the right tools,” Sorota said. “Our wrenches didn’t fit the nuts and bolts because they were on the metric system. We had to grind them open a little more to get inside.”
GE had just six months to redesign the engine, and the team worked nonstop, guided by Whittle’s blueprints and a handful of British engineers. There were 15 people on Sorota’s shift. His job was to help design the chambers that channeled air inside the engine. “The FBI man warned me that if I gave away any secrets, the penalty was death,” Sorota said.
In March 1942, just five months into the project, the Hush-Hush Boys wheeled their prototype inside a concrete bunker attached to the workshop and nicknamed “Fort Knox” for a test. The cell opened into an old brick smokestack to channel exhaust and mask the tests. But the engine stalled.
In the summer of 1942, 10 months after they started, the engineers loaded the first pair of working jet engines, each producing 1,300 pounds of thrust, onto a railcar and shipped them to the Muroc Army Air Field, in California’s Mojave Desert. The aircraft designer Larry Bell was working in parallel with the GE team and building America’s first jet plane, the XP-59. On Oct. 2, 1942, the plane soared to 6,000 feet, a small first step for a technology that ended up shrinking the world. The engine, called I-A, is now part of the Smithsonian collection in Washington, D.C.
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, OM, KBE, CB, FRS, FRAeS (1 June 1907 – 8 August 1996) was an English engineer, inventor, and Royal Air Force (RAF) air officer. He is credited with having invented the turbojet engine. A patent was submitted by Maxime Guillaume in 1921 for a similar invention which was technically unfeasible at the time. Whittle's jet engines were developed some years earlier than those of Germany's Hans von Ohain, who designed the first-to-fly (but never operational) turbojet engine.
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 #history #jetengine
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| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOzE5GYhaoU and |
