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The Jet Age is a period in the history of aviation defined by the advent of aircraft powered by jet turbine engines and the social and cultural changes fostered by commercial jet travel. Jet airliners were able to fly higher, faster, and farther than older piston ‑powered propliners , making transcontinental and intercontinental travel ...
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 .
The history of aviation spans over two millennia, from the earliest innovations like kites and attempts at tower jumping to supersonic and hypersonic flight in powered, heavier-than-air jet aircraft. Kite flying in China, dating back several hundred years BC, is considered the earliest example of man-made flight. [ 1 ]
Lifting bodies were a major area of research in the 1960s and 70s as a means to build a small and lightweight crewed spacecraft. The US built several famous lifting body rocket planes to test the concept, as well as several rocket-launched re-entry vehicles that were tested over the Pacific.
Although only a design, (scale models were built in 1843 [74] or 1848 [75] and flew 10 or 130 feet) it was the first in history for a propeller-driven fixed-wing aircraft. [ 74 ] [ 75 ] [ 76 ] Henson and his collaborator John Stringfellow even dreamed of the first Aerial Transit Company .
Jet airliners that entered service in the 1960s were powered by slim, low-bypass turbofan engines, many aircraft used the rear-engined, T-tail configuration, such as the BAC One-Eleven, Boeing 737, and Douglas DC-9 twinjets; Boeing 727, Hawker Siddeley Trident, Tupolev Tu-154 trijets; and the paired multi-engined Ilyushin Il-62, and Vickers VC10.
Although the most common type, the gas turbine powered jet engine, was certainly a 20th-century invention, many of the needed advances in theory and technology leading to this invention were made well before this time. The jet engine was clearly an idea whose time had come. Frank Whittle submitted his first patent in 1930. By the late 1930s ...
The first successful jet aircraft, the Heinkel He 178, flew only five days before the war started on 1 September 1939. [1] By the end of the conflict on 2 September 1945 [ 2 ] Germany , the United Kingdom, and the United States all had operational turbojet -powered fighter aircraft while Japan had produced, but not used, motorjet -powered ...