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Aviation History
1949
1949 - 1790.PDF
554 FLIGHT, 27 October 1949 jV© Aiwrserew ful jet-propelled aircraft, two previous claimants to this proud position must first be mentioned. On August 27th, 1939, the Heinkel He 178 made its first flight, but the He S.3 turbojet installed in it gave serious trouble, and further German jet flight development, retarded by metal- lurgical problems, was not resumed until after the Gloster machine had appeared. The Italian Caproni-Campini C.C.2, first airborne in August, 1940, did have a form of jet-propulsion, but instead of the turbine of the true turbojet, it had an in-line piston engine as a power source for the compressor. Although a novel design, it showed no great technical advance and its performance was poor. The uphill pre-war progress of Sir Frank Whittle's com- pany—Power Jets, Ltd.—is a story outside the province of this article, but a "flashback" to 1938 will recall the conception of the Gloster-Whittle venture. On March 18th of that year Power Jets received the first development con- tract from the Air Ministry—a crowning and encouraging moment after ten years of research, with signs of success appearing only by gradual stages. Just over a year later, on July 7th, 1939, the Ministry placed an order for the first flight uuit, designated Wj, and shortly afterwards began discussions with the Gloster Aircraft Company concerning the design and construction of a fighter aircraft to test this new means of propulsion. The contract for this type, the E.28/39, was placed on February 3rd, 1940, and envisaged a four-gun, 380-m.p.h. fighter, powered by a unit of 1,200 lb static thrust. Its primary object, stated the contract, "will be to flight-test the engine installation, but the design shall be based on requirements for a fixed-gun intercepter. . . ." Guns and CO. LTD. TEST FLIGHT REPORT No.: * HLOT 1st night. 3an«i*l 1S.9.41. 1M0 Urm. AH ».4O*l. type. All ntnetafcle larar .Tff.«*«h. *° «ir»«rw» fitted «Uh ihla natted of radiator blasfca* ofr, Sort rmtimtpr t» oirwlt Zanffla SO «01s WON <kMt 1*« total taval XX* u ••Owl 10" an ariflaal OM« «ta«ol Ug fltM* ror tazylag trlala «t Brettnorta. Statia traral t* UmUU f *r"~a» tfca flm la« MB** AMI atret araanr* ra*iaa« fw« 140 lha^.la. »• UB Usq.la, TJrra pninn MUH« MM M UH.1I. to MUHiUi __ _ St««rlae 00 aoaa "haal ll'althrr al«a or tka aantn Xlw snkaa ea all Urn Mtaala. mutmtm-. Theories proved : on successful completion of the first flight. Whittle congratulates Britain's first jet pilot, the late F/L. Sa/er, ammunition were not demanded for initial flight trials, how- ever, and, in fact, were never fitted. The subsequent work of the Gloster design team at Brockworth, headed by Mr. George Carter, was undertaken with the closest co-operation of Power Jets, whose engine testing and development continued in an okl foundry at Lutterworth, rented from the British Thomson-Houston Company. The B.T.H. concern was responsible for the drawings and construction of the Wi turbojet, and had played an integral part in gas-turbine research since 1936. Flight Lieutenant W. E. P. Johnson, now managing director of Power Jets (Research and Development), Ltd., supervised installation, and was responsible for the liaison between makers of the power unit and the airframe. Two E.28S were under construction, and as the first— registered W 4041—neared completion, it was transferred from the Gloster works at Brockworth to a garage at Cheltenham to lessen the chances of destruction in an air raid. Meanwhile, construction of the Wi was proceeding. Some of the components made for it had been deemed unairworthy and, together with a number of spare com- ponents, were combined to form an early version—the WiX. Preliminary tests were made on this unit, showing that performance, while not fully up to expectations, was greatly in advance of that of the earlier Whittle designs. To conserve the Wi, it was decided to install the unair- worthy WiX in the E.28 for taxying trials. Earry in April, 1941, the aircraft was taken to Brock- worth for these initial tests. Completed, the E.28 was seen to be a complete breakaway from the accepted formula for fighter design. As events proved, its appearance was an earnest of later developments. Fuselage design presented a major problem, and in order that the risks involved by the very nature of the work should not be increased, a simple " straight-through " power installation was adopted. The turbojet was positioned in the rear fuselage, and its tail- pipe carried through to the extreme tail; in the nose was a circular intake split into two ducts which iollowed the fuselage sides to the plenum chamber. Supported at four points on a tubular engine-bearer frame, the Wi itself had ten combustion chambers of the reverse-flow type, to which air was fed by a double-sided, aluminium-alloy centrifugal compressor; paraffin was injected by ten Lubbock burners, and the products of combustion energized a single-stage, axial-flow turbine. The turbine's 72 blades employed, for the first time, the "fir-tree" method of root fixing. The rear bearing was cooled by liquid which circulated through two radiators mounted in the air intake ducts; in practice, one of the radiators was blanked off from the coolant cir- cuit, and the rear bearing was eventually cooled by air from the compressor in place of liquid. At its maximum permitted r.p.m. of 16,500 (above 4,000ft this figure was increased to 17,750), the Wi produced 860 1b thrust. Of all-metal, monocoque construction, the fuselage was covered with light-alloy stressed skin. An 81-gallon fuel tank was fitted between the turbojet and the forward-placed (Left) A facsimile of the first page of flight-test report No. 1.
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