Nelson Evening Mail MONDAY, JANUARY 10, 1944 PROPELLERLESS PLANE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 10 January 1944, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail MONDAY, JANUARY 10, 1944 PROPELLERLESS PLANE

WHEN a new aeroplane arrives at the stage where it can be put into production it has passed successfully through some gruelling tests. This is the point which has been reached with the jet-propelled aircraft, news of the existence of which has just been released. The story behind it is a tribute to British inventive genius and Anglo-American co-opera-tion in pooling resources. Group Captain Frank Whittle’s name will go down alongside those of other patient and persevering research workers who have added significant chapters to the science of flight. In particular his devotion to the experiment over ten years will be likened to the efforts of R. J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire, except that Whittle has had much more sympathetic treatment from the Air Ministry and aeroplane manufacturers. Working on a principle, the theoretical propulsion possibilities of which have been recognised for over half a century, he has, with the co-opera-tion of others, so far translated it into practice that the jet-propelled fighter will enter the lists in this war. Time may not allow the full effects of the new plane as a fighting machine to be exploited. Much more important will be the influence of jet propulsion on long-term aeroplane design and performance for peacetime utilisation. To place a picture of to-day’s streamlined plane alongside those brave efforts of the aviation pioneers is to recognise how far we have progressed. Under the spur of war the “boys in the back room” have packed perhaps a generation’s progress. into four or five years and it does not tax the imagination to visualise a time—not far away—when the present accepted standardised designs will be outmoded almost as often as motor car models are. To be told that we have an aeroplane that flies high and fast Without a propeller is a surprise. The people of Britain have also discovered that it has a rather eerie screech and a rumble which made them think that one of Goering’s screamers was coming down. Now they know the facts they have nicknamed the new arrival the “Squirt.” This ingenious incorporation of a principle in a name gives the cue to the problem on which Group Captain Whittle has been working for a decade almost without respite. He started the same year as Hitler came into power and had the first engine running successfully four years later. Four years after that the Gloster Aircraft Company had built a plane powered by the new engine and it was flown successfully. Since then, May 1941, the plane has been produced in both Britain and United States and training on it carried out without a single mishap. Seeing that the designers have been able to obtain both speed and altitude they must have solved most of the difficulties which troubled other experimenters with the same principle, such as the Italians, who got their machine to fly, but only at a fuel consumption rate out of all proportion to speed and power developed. Judging from

the details released—and they are by no means complete—fuel consumption is still one of the points remaining to be improved. For war purposes jet-propelled fighters are being concentrated on and these may have already been in action, for it is not like the British to tell the Germans about secret weapons before they have experienced their potentialities. When inventive brains and energy have helped to outstrip the enemy, the genius of a man like Whittle can be turned towards the aviation needs of peace. They will be without parallel in the sphere of aerial' transport. One of the distinct probabilities of the not distant future is voyaging in the stratosphere and the jet-propelled plane may be the answer to those who have been hoping to find ever swifter and easier air communication in higher flying.