Jet plane

The Heinkel He 178 , the first jet aircraft

Me 262 with external jet engines under the wings

Modern Learjet 60 business jet with external jet engines

Jet airplanes are airplanes that fly by jet engines by recoil propulsion.

Jet plane , jet jet and jet are the colloquial names for it. Jet jet is a pleonasm , because the part of the word jet stands for jet engine or nozzle , so that the type of propulsion is strung together twice.

history

Beginnings

The first aircraft with a mixture of jet and piston engines , the Coanda-1910 , was built in 1910 by the Romanian engineer Henri Marie Coandă . It was presented at the second international aviation exhibition in Paris in October 1910, but had an accident in December 1910. The concept was initially not pursued any further.

The first jet aircraft were developed for the military from 1936 on the basis of the engines by Hans von Ohain and Frank Whittle . The Whittle engine first ran on April 12, 1937, a few weeks after Hans von Ohain's engine ran for the first time on the test bench. They flew for the first time in Germany ( Heinkel He 178 on August 27, 1939 in Rostock-Marienehe ), in Italy on August 28, 1940 ( Campini-Caproni CC2 ) and in Great Britain on May 15, 1941 ( Gloster E.28 / 39 ). The first jet fighter in the world to be used militarily was the Messerschmitt Me 262 , developed in Germany , which was sent to a retraining unit from April 1944 and attacked a British mosquito for the first time on July 26, 1944 . The British Gloster Meteor was in regular relay service from July 1944.

post war period

After 1945, jet aircraft were also designed for civil aviation. The BOAC was the first airline to use the De Havilland DH.106 Comet , which had its maiden flight on July 27, 1949 and started scheduled flights in 1952. A series of accidents in the years 1953–1954 ultimately provided insights that not only affect the revised Comet, but generally all jet aircraft such as the subsequent Tupolev Tu-104 (in service from 1956), Boeing 707 (in service from 1958) and Douglas DC-8 (in use from 1959). The first civil German jet aircraft was the 152 , developed in Dresden from 1958 to 1961 , which, however, never got beyond the prototype status due to economic, political and technical problems.

On April 26, 1948, the first supersonic flight with a jet-powered fighter, the F-86 Saber, took place. The first supersonic flight ever took place on October 12, 1947, but with a rocket plane, the Bell X-1 . Since then, fighter planes have generally been designed as jet-powered supersonic aircraft.

Further development

Later milestones in civil aviation were the wide- bodied aircraft Boeing 747 , under the name Jumbojet from 1970, as well as the three-jet types McDonnell Douglas DC-10 (1971) and Lockheed L-1011 TriStar (1972), whose size was only exceeded from 2007 by the two-story Airbus A380 has been. The Franco-British Concorde was the only civilian supersonic aircraft in commercial use for a longer period from 1976, while the prototype of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 flew a little earlier, but then had to be completely redesigned and the aircraft built only in 1977/78 as a whole 55 passenger flights carried out.

Types for short and medium-haul transport, such as historically the French Caravelle , the Boeing 727 or the Douglas DC-9 (including their further development McDonnell Douglas DC-9-80 (MD-80) ), or today the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 .

In short-distance passenger traffic, jet aircraft have not completely displaced propeller-driven aircraft ; Passenger aircraft equipped with modern turboprop engines (e.g. the ATR series ) continue to be used and built there.

The small “jets” have also been used in business travel for decades, for example with the Learjet . There are variants available in practically all sizes; even intercontinental flights can be carried out ( Gulfstream G500 , Bombardier Global Family , Falcon 7X ).