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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 .
This article outlines the important developments in the history of the development of the air-breathing (duct) jet engine.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 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 ]
By the end of the war almost all work on piston-powered fighters had ended. A few designs combining piston- and jet-engines for propulsion – such as the Ryan FR Fireball – saw brief use, but by the end of the 1940s virtually all new fighters were jet-powered. Despite their advantages, the early jet-fighters were far from perfect.
They also documented their work in photographs, although they did not make public any photos of their powered flights until 1908. Their written records also were not made available to the public at the time, though they were published in 1953 after the Wright estate donated them to the U.S. Library of Congress. [36]
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 structural parts of a fixed-wing aircraft are called the airframe. The parts present can vary according to the aircraft's type and purpose. Early types were usually made of wood with fabric wing surfaces, When engines became available for powered flight around a hundred years ago, their mounts were made of metal.