Exactly

by Simon Winchester

  Heat was probably the trickiest problem. The engine’s combustion chamber would create temperatures quite unknown to anyone then involved with burners and boiler-firing equipment. Bearings, too, presented problems—no one had ever invented a bearing that would do its work in the kind of temperatures and pressures likely to be encountered in the beating heart of a jet engine. And the experiments that BTH had to perform—testing fires at all kind of temperatures, testing bearings to their breaking point, producing billowing fumes and dangerous lakes of fuel, and explosions, explosions all the while—no one could explain what was going on, because all was classified top-secret.

  It was perhaps just as well, as the first test runs of a completed engine were a near-total disaster. They took place in April 1937, with the plant outside the town of Rugby, in the English Midlands, well prepared for catastrophe—if turbine pieces fracture and get thrown out of an engine, they can be lethal. In an incident some weeks prior, a conventional turbine had exploded and hurled chunks of red-hot metal two miles away, killing several people en route. So the test engine was mounted on a truck (which, because its starter motor weighed a couple of tons, had to have its wheels removed) and was shielded by three pieces of inch-thick steel. Its jet pipe was routed out of a window, and the control for the starter motor was several yards away, with Whittle giving his orders by hand signal to the brave or foolhardy fitter employed to work it.

  Whittle’s report was not exactly the cool and laconic writing of an experienced test pilot:

  I had the fuel pump switched on. One of the test hands then engaged the starter coupling (which was designed to disengage as soon as the main rotor of the engine over-ran the starting motor) and I gave hand signals to the man on the starter control panel.

  The starter motor began to turn over. When the speed reached about 1000 rpm I opened the control valve which admitted fuel to a pilot burner in the combustion chamber, and rapidly turned the handle of the hand magneto to ignite the finely atomized spray of fuel which this burner emitted. An observer, peering through a quartz observation window in the combustion chamber, gave me the “thumbs up” sign to show the pilot flame was alight.

  I signalled for an increase of speed for the starter motor, and as the tachometer indicated 2000 rpm I opened the main fuel control valve.

  For a second or two the speed of the engine increased slowly and then, with a rising shriek like an air-raid siren, the speed began to rise rapidly, and large patches of red heat became visible on the combustion chamber casing. The engine was obviously out of control. All the BTH personnel, realising what this meant, went down to the factory at high speed in varying directions. A few of them took refuge in nearby large steam engine exhaust casings, which made useful shelters.

  I screwed down the control valve immediately, but this had no effect and the speed continued to rise, but fortunately the acceleration ceased at about 8000 rpm and slowly the revs dropped again. Needless to say this incident did not do my nervous system any good at all. I have rarely been so frightened.

  It happened again the next day, sheets of flame spouting from the jet pipe, vapor from leaking joints being ignited by red-hot metal in the combustion chamber, flames dancing in midair, and the BTH workers vanishing “even more rapidly.”

  But, said Whittle, after the soothing balm of several glasses of red wine taken in a local hotel, there was a simple explanation, and for a while he was confident that the combustion problem could be solved. But he was overoptimistic, and after test after test after test through that summer of 1937, all failures of one kind or another, a total redesign of the engine seemed essential. Yet, by now, there was almost no money, Whittle himself was in a near-hysterical mood, and the project seemed in dire danger of foundering. Moreover, the testing had become so dangerous that BTH insisted that any further experiments be conducted at a site seven safe miles away from its factory, in a disused foundry near the town of Lutterworth.

  It was here that the project’s fortunes turned. By now, the Air Ministry had decided to throw in a modest sum, largely because Henry Tizard had written glowingly of what he believed to be Whittle’s genius, and Tizard was so widely respected that notice was taken at the highest levels of government. BTH also put in some funds, and new tests of Whittle’s redesigned engine began in April 1938. The first run ended when a cleaning rag was sucked into the engine through the compressor fan. In May, a test run achieved a speed of 13,000 rpm, though it was brought to a costly sudden shutdown when nine of the turbine blades shattered, detached themselves from the disc, and blasted their way through the engine. It took four more months to rebuild it, and this time, instead of building just one combustion chamber, the engineers built ten of them, which enveloped the turbine rotor like insulating pillows and gave the engine a look of substance and heft and symmetry, ironically not too dissimilar from the radial piston engines the jet sought to supplant.

  And this engine worked, finally. On June 30, 1939, less than ten weeks before the outbreak of World War II, an Air Ministry official came up to Lutterworth to inspect it, witnessed it running for twenty-eight minutes at a sustained speed of 16,000 rpm, and made a crucially important decision. Whittle’s design was to be approved for the manufacture of a flight engine; and shortly thereafter, the Gloster Aircraft Company* was ordered to produce an experimental airplane that would be powered by it. The engine was to be designated the W1X; the plane, the Gloster E28/39.

  It fell to the technical director at Gloster, a sobersided pipe-smoking engineer named George Carter, to design the new craft. The ministry wanted it to be both a flying test-bed and a warplane, so it had to have four guns and be loaded with ammunition. But Carter said it should be small and light, weighing little more than a ton, and eventually won the government’s agreement that he could leave the weaponry out of the first two prototypes. Building started in 1940, when war was fully under way and the Luftwaffe was bombing British cities with great enthusiasm, so Gloster, which had an all-too-visible factory and airfield near its home base, decided to move this highly secret project into an abandoned motorcar showroom, the Regent Garage, nearby, in the city of Cheltenham. A single armed policeman stood guard outside while, inside, a small band of craftsmen labored to finish the machine. No one, or no German, ever found out.

  It is worth noting that during the run-up to the first British jet-powered flight, a German turbojet-powered aircraft had already been tested, on August 27, 1939, a week before the war’s outbreak. The plane was the Heinkel He 178, and its engine was based on the design by Hans von Ohain back in 1933, mentioned previously. The German government was unimpressed by the craft, however, deriding it for being slow and having a combat endurance of only a few minutes. Berlin then eventually bowed to advice (offered to Hitler himself by the great German aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt) that jets used too much fuel. So the privately funded and developed Heinkel experiment, though technically the first jet-powered flight ever, proved an eventual failure.

  The shrouds came off the British effort in the early spring of 1941, to reveal a sweet little aircraft, toylike in its smooth and stubby simplicity, with a foot-wide, mouthlike air intake hole for a nose—and no propeller!—a jet pipe snugged in beneath the tail, a pair of wings, a sliding-door cockpit, and little else. The undercarriage was short and retractable—there was no need to have the plane high above the runway to prevent a spinning propeller from striking the ground. In short, the Gloster E28/39—the government’s order number was 28; the production year was 1939—was simplicity itself, economical in look, in design, and in cost of materials.

  It was completed some months before Whittle’s engine, which still had myriad fine-tuning problems. At one stage, the entire engine was mounted in the tail assembly of a big Wellington bomber (air inlets replacing the gun turrets) to see how it would perform at altitude. It did well, and so, unbolted from the bomber, it was taken by truck to the Gloster test airfield near the Cotswold village of Brockworth, a town better known today for its annu
al midsummer cheese-rolling contest, when drunken locals try to pursue a huge round cheese as it is set thundering down a local hill. There, it was finally mated into George Carter’s little aircraft: it sat directly behind the pilot, though with the fuel tank sandwiched between it and the pilot’s back.

  Unlike the cheese, the aircraft was kept firmly on the horizontal for its first trials, largely to see how it handled during taxiing. But the chosen test pilot, Gerry Sayer, was apparently unable to contain himself at the smoothness of the throttle controls, and at the rapid acceleration to full power of a near-vibrationless engine, and so took the plane off for a pair of hundred-foot hops along the runway, astonishing all, and prompting an American engineer standing on the wing of a Stirling bomber almost to fall onto the ground at seeing a propellerless aircraft roaring along a runway and lifting off, if only for a few seconds. He was told to disbelieve what he had seen. German agents might have been everywhere.

  In the end, it was decided to take the aircraft (now semiofficially known as the Pioneer, which, though a name of slightly greater historical portent, never took off, as it were) up to the airfield at Cranwell, Whittle’s old air force school. It was flatter (fewer cheese-rolling hills) and less populated, making it easier to keep the first flight secret.

  This being Britain, it was the weather that now conspired to stall things, and the chosen day, May 15, 1941, dawned cloudy and cold. Whittle left for the engine assembly plant, where he had work to do on the next generation of engines the air force had selected to be put into what would be called Gloster Meteor fighters. He kept an eye on the skies, however, and when finally there were sufficient patches of blue sky “to mend a sailor’s trousers,” as the saying has it, he knew the evening would come clear. He drove back to Cranwell like the wind.

  He was only just in time. As he suspected, Gerry Sayer already had the plane out on the long east–west runway. The breathless Whittle joined his colleagues from Power Jets and took a car to about the halfway mark, and waited there as they watched Sayer turning the doughty little craft into the bitterly cold westerly breeze.

  Anticipating speed, Sayer secured his cockpit canopy. He set his trim to keep the nose slightly down, and retracted the flaps. Then he stood on the brakes and began to spool up the engine. When it was whining satisfactorily and the plane was bouncing against the brakes, he took his feet off the pedals. The craft bounded forward and began to accelerate toward the watery sun. It was 7:40 p.m. Dusk was falling. Whittle watched, clenching his fists with anxiety.

  After about five hundred yards of steady acceleration, and with the engine now roaring lustily and flame spearing from the after jet pipe, Sayer eased back the stick. Effortlessly, with the aerofoils behaving in textbook style and the engine never once faltering in its delivery of a pure, whistling five hundred horses of power, the tiny aircraft rose calmly and propellerless into the evening sky. In seconds, the Pioneer was at a thousand feet, and the watchers on the ground could see as Sayer used the hydraulic accumulator to retract the undercarriage. Suddenly, the plane, by now emitting a faint trail of dark smoke, looked like a smoothly engineered bullet, vanishing into clouds that then closed seamlessly behind her.

  All that Whittle and his colleagues could then hear was the even roar of the engine—a jet engine, the first-ever confection of precisely engineered compressor blades and turbine blades and hot-sprayed fuel and Newton’s Third Law to rise and to fly in England, and the first ever in the world to enjoy the support of a national government. For the coming minutes, there may have been nothing to see but the clouds overhead, but the timbre and volume and direction of the sound indicated to all below that, up there, Gerry Sayer was having fun, was putting the little craft through her paces, was being the exemplar of an old-school test pilot, and was inaugurating, officially, the Jet Age.

  Then, after maybe a quarter of an hour, Whittle and his men heard the sound grow louder from the east, and then they could see her, glinting in the low sun and preparing to land. They saw the undercarriage come down; the flaps and spoilers were lowered, the speed reduced, the glide path achieved—until the plane was no more than ten feet above the rain-damp runway, moving so slowly and decorously it was almost hovering. At this point, Sayer cut the power way back, and the craft settled down for the final seconds of her first flight, then dropped gently onto the center line with the wheel supports bouncing under the weight, and then he turned his charge toward the waiting car and stopped, turning the throttle back to stop and silence the engine. All was quiet: there was no sound now except for faint residual radio chatter with the control tower, the creak of cooling metal on the fuselage—it was cold that night, and the engine parts had been very warm—the susurrus of blowing airfield grass as the breeze kicked up a little, and then, suddenly, the unmistakable sound of frantically running feet.

  They were racing toward the plane. Frank Whittle, who thirteen years before had dreamed up the idea of an engine and had battled long and hard to get it made, and George Carter, who had designed the tiny craft that would be hoisted by it into the sky, and into the history books, ran without thinking across the taxiway, and together they reached up and grasped Gerry Sayer’s hand and shook it with congratulations and expressions of relief. It was the spring of 1941. A new era had begun.

  Yet there was no Ministry of Information film crew to take note, no journalist on hand, no one from the BBC, no photographer, save for one amateur who took a blurry picture of a grinning Whittle reaching up to the lip of the cockpit and offering his congratulations and thanks.

  IT WAS NOT until the New Year of 1944, fully two years and eight months later, that the British public was told of the new invention, of the new age that had stolen up on them, unbeknownst to almost all. “Jet Propelled Aeroplane,” said the Times, on page 4. “Success of British Invention”: “After years of experiments Britain now has flying a fighter aeroplane propelled by a revolutionary type of power unit, the perfection of which represents one of the greatest steps forward in the history of aviation. The new system, known as jet propulsion, does away with the need for an orthodox engine and also for an air-screw.”

  Frank Whittle’s name is mentioned four paragraphs in, as is the fact that the U.S. government was apprised of the success of the first flight within weeks of its occurrence, in July 1941. Yet the British public, which had footed the bill, was kept firmly in the dark. Likewise the American public, who were told the news of the new engine on the same day: January 6, 1944.

  Frank Whittle, initially honored—King George VI conferred a knighthood—and somewhat revered, did not have as happy a time in postwar England as one might think he deserved. Power Jets was nationalized, and its chief engineer sidelined, put out to pasture. He traveled, he lectured, he wrote, and he particularly savored his election to a fellowship of the Royal Society. He won prizes, the most valuable of which, at around half a million dollars, he decided generously to split with Hans von Ohain, the German inventor whose Heinkel-powered plane had been the true first to fly with a turbojet engine. Whittle argued often for the good sense of building a supersonic passenger plane, and badgered officials long before Concorde was a drawing board dream. But no one listened, and by 1976, with his marriage failed, he decided to light out for America, and spent his final years in a suburb of Washington, DC.

  Occasionally he was called back home. He returned to be presented with the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth in 1986; and again when there was a bit of a fuss around the fiftieth anniversary of his former engine company’s creation, in 1987; and then, with his son Ian Whittle piloting, he came to London and flew happily on a Cathay Pacific 747 passenger aircraft nonstop to Hong Kong.

  It was in one small and curious way a memorable flight. For, back then, when Kai Tak Airport was the only commercial airfield in the then–British colony, most inbound flights had to make an alarming last-minute course change in order to land safely. Standing instructions for the approach required that the plane come into the colony’s airspace from th
e west and, losing height rapidly, head directly toward an enormous red-and-white checkerboard that had been obligingly painted onto the rockface of a mountainside. When the plane was just a mile distant, less than twenty seconds from closing hard with the rocks, the pilot had to make a sudden sharp, thirty-seven-and-a-half-degree turn to starboard, a maneuver that, if faultlessly performed, then allows for a direct low-altitude approach onto Kai Tak’s runway 013.

  Anyone not warned beforehand about this maneuver can be severely alarmed—and Frank Whittle, who had been sitting calmly in the cockpit behind his son during the cruise and was now preparing for a routine landing, was indeed somewhat bothered by what, for a few seconds, seemed an inevitable crash. But the required maneuver, invariably perfectly timed and precisely accomplished by pilots of long experience with this most exotic of eastern approaches (his son this day included), put the aircraft down a few moments later, and with customary exactitude.

  THE PLANE THAT day had been powered by four Rolls-Royce jet engines,* all of which had fired perfectly to complete this dramatic maneuver. It was also a Rolls-Royce jet engine, but a very much more powerful variant, and built for a very much larger aircraft, that, almost a quarter of a century later, failed so dramatically over Indonesia. The official postmortems, published three years later in Australia, went some way toward illuminating the formidable technical problems and challenges involved in the making of a modern high-power, high-performance jet engine.