Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 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 ...
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 ...
Almost as soon as they were invented, aeroplanes were used for military purposes. The first country to use them for military purposes was Italy, whose aircraft made reconnaissance, bombing and artillery correction flights in Libya during the Italian-Turkish war (September 1911 – October 1912). This war also saw Ottoman soldiers shoot down a ...
Few of the claims to powered flight were widely accepted, or even made, at the time the events took place. The Wrights suffered in their early years from a lack of general recognition, while neither Ader nor Langley made any claim in the years immediately following their work. Indeed, Langley died in 1906 without ever making any claim of success.
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.
The Aerial Steamer, made by Thomas Moy, sometimes called the Moy-Shill Aerial Steamer, was an unmanned tandem wing aircraft driven by a 3 horsepower (2.2 kW) steam engine using methylated spirits as fuel. It was 14 feet (4.3 m) long and weighed about 216 pounds (98 kg) of which the engine accounted for 80 pounds (36 kg), and ran on three wheels.
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 ...