I was quite astonished to know what it was because it had no propeller. And John replied. Oh, it's easy, old boy. It just sucks itself along like a Hoover. There was the. Awful race against time. There was the skulduggery. She used to say, Oh well, Daddy's doing something very hush, hush. I thought, my goodness, why didn't I think of this before? And it seems so obvious then. A small English church is the last resting place of a man who didn't just change the face of the earth, he enabled us to see what it actually looked like. His name was Frank Whittle. This is the story of how he invented the jet engine. He overcame all the odds, only to see the British government almost throw his idea away and miss a chance to shorten the Second World War. I was born on June the 1st, 1907 in Coventry. My parents are working class. My father was a foreman in the machine tool manufacturers. I lived there in Coventry for 9 years, went from an elementary school there, and then the family moved to Leamington Spa because my father bought a small, very small engineering outfit called the livington valve and piston ring company. And I really did get my first engineering experiences there because I helped him sometimes. So I think it was about Tuppence and hour or something like that. Making slots in Valve stems. In Lemington, Frank also won a scholarship to the town's secondary school. I was very lazy with homework and got a series of raspberries for that. But at the end of term I often do quite well, for instance come top of maths. Something like that. I never did win a prize at school. But I did an awful lot of private study. I used to go down to the library. In Leamington Spa and study all sorts of things that should not in the school curriculum. And that's where I first started to learn about gas turbines. I was always attracted to flying from my earliest years, almost. When I was four my favuorite toy, and this is 1911. It was a tin model of a Bleriot and my heroes were people like Captain Albert Ball and Major Mccudden and so on, the VCs of the First World War. And I just wanted to fly. And also I thought that boys in the uniform of aircraft apprentices look very good. So I decided I'd like to wear that uniform and applied to join as an apprentice. The Royal Air Force, however, rejected young Whittle. He was too small. I was sunk for the time being but before I left the camp, a very kindly physical training Sergeant, if you can imagine such a thing. He took pity on me and he gave me a diet to follow and series of exercises, Maxalding exercises. I did all that for six months. I put on three inches on height and three inches on my chest. So I thought well I'll have another shot. And I wrote to the ministry but they said no, Once you've been turned down, you've been turned down forever. I thought, well, I go through the whole process again as I'd never had, in the hope that the bureaucracy wouldn't pick it up. And I was lucky that time and ended up at Cranwell in No. 4 wing. Whittle didn't enjoy life as an Air Force apprentice in that rank, he would never get to fly. What brightened Whittle's life was the model aircraft society, where he became the leading light at building working replicas. So much so that the initials BWMAS. Which stood for boys wing model aircraft society was most people said that meant boys would boy whittles model aircraft society, because we are now we were known as Boy Whittle, Boy Smith and so forth in those days. Whittle skills at making model planes singled him out to the authorities. Perhaps he might be officer material. There were to be five cadets selected from No.4 Wing at Cranwell. And I was number six in the passing out list, so when the number one boy failed because of his eyesight, it made me eligible. The founder of the Royal Air Force had his doubts though. Lord Trenchard nearly stopped it. Because. I hadn't been a leading boy and I hadn't made my no kind of a name in sports on which a lot of weight was put in those days. Whittle's CO had a compelling reason to make Trenchard think again. He thought that he'd got a mathematical genius. It was this natural gift that got whittle a cadetship. Less than one percent of apprentices made the huge step to join the elite in the Officers Training College at Cranwell. Although this was next to the apprentices wing, it was socially another world, one that shared the culture of the public schools from where most of the cadets then came. In the bleak Lincolnshire countryside, Frank Whittle's life now took a new direction. Cranwell provided a very intensive education for whittle. For the cadets, just as it is today, the highlight of the course was the flying lessons. I learned to fly on the Avro 504K that was a very ancient type of airplane, 1911 type, and it sort with a toothpick between the wheels, you know? And prevented tipping over on its nose. Which In reality, it helps it tip it over on its nose. Or even turn upside down. Whittle was soon a daring, even overconfident pilot, and one who had his fair share of accidents. I have to confess I wrecked two or three airplanes. Free at least, yeah. The the first one I got lost. And wanted to get back to Cranwell when the visibility had deteriorated very badly. It was the day, incidentally, of the cross country run like Cranwell, which all cadets hated. And they most of my fellow cadets, thought I'd done it to get out of the cross country. In between learning to fly and studying at Cranwell, Whittle first conceived the idea that would make him famous. It all started with a student thesis. All cadets had to write a thesis and I chose future developments in aircraft design. Rather ambitious and rather concentrated on the engine side. But the main thing in that thesis was that I arrived at what I now know was the well known Breguet formula. I wasn't familiar with it at the time, connecting speed, range, engine efficiency and so forth. And to me that meant that if you wanted to go very fast and far, you would have to go very high heights of 50,000 feet, that sort of thing. At times where the piston engine obviously wouldn't work. And at speeds it's a where the propeller wouldn't work. So I've started to look for a new kind of power plant. Whittle prepared this paper during the first half of 1928, but his findings at Cranwell were the fruit of the five years he had by now been training there. My Cranwell thesis. When the professor marked it, he wrote on it. In effect, he didn't really understand it, but he gave me 30 out of 30, which I thought was quite satisfactory. Whittle envisaged flying speeds of 500 miles an hour at a time when propeller planes struggled to reach 150. These machines were noisy and shook the pilot terribly. That's because their engines were actually car motors on a bigger scale with many moving parts. Whittle felt an aesthetic dislike for such power plants. The problem with the piston engine as you go up height even though you supercharge it. Is that the power drops off as the air gets thinner, and there eventually comes a point where it won't generate enough power to turn itself over against its own friction. Whittle's idea would use the same principle as a balloon filled with air. When this escapes, every child knows what happens, but it wasn't clear how an engine might recreate such a force. I considered a piston engine driving a fan inside a hollow fuselage. And then thought, well, why not throw that piston engine away, up the compression ratio of the fan and substitute a turbine for the Piston engine. And there was the turbojet. By now, Whittle had left Cranwell. But his search for this solution had preoccupied him ever since. It didn't come to me out of the blue for the simple reason that I've been trying to find it for 18 months. But just the the thought, get rid of the piston engine and substitute the turbine, you might say that came out of the blue. Whether I was having a bath or what, whatever at the time I couldn't tell you. Whittle's plan proposed just one moving part. This would be a shaft with a compressor. Driven by a turbine at the other end. It would work like this. The compressor spins around, sucking air into combustion chambers at many times atmospheric pressure. Here this air is mixed with vaporized fuel and ignited. The hot gas created expands through the turbine, turning the shaft, and escapes into the atmosphere. It is this continuous force which propels a jet airplane along. The turbojet concept brought with it so many natural advantages. A very big factor in favor of a a jet engine was that when you went up high, the air temperature was very low. very cold. And that benefited the compressor a lot. It meant that you could get a much better conditions for the compressor. And the other thing is that in a normal towing the velocity coming out of it is wasted. In the case of the jet engine, that was completely used. After the idea had come to me. I thought, my goodness, why didn't I think of this before? And it seems so obvious then. This was whittlers moment of genius. He had seen the future of powered flight and he was a pilot officer aged just 22. I was at the Central Flying School at Wittering, doing the flying instructors course. One of the instructors there was WEP Johnson, who became a very good friend and colleague in later years. And he'd been trained as a patent agent and he became very interested in my proposal. He thought it would work and he helped me to draft a patent. "And have you ever patented anything?" "No". "I don't know a thing about it". "Does a patent both published and protect"? "That is the whole point of patents". "But one thing's essential". "File a patent application before touting the thing round"." Otherwise you haven't a hope". I'll tell you what, let's rough out of specification now". "What Kind? What do we do"? Well, you make a rather better sketch. And I'll get on with the clever bit, the writing", OK. Armed with his patent, whittle offered his idea to industry. No one thought it could ever work. According to the theories of the time, there was this fundamental difficulty with gas turbines, inefficient compressors, inefficient turbines. And the other big snag was the materials then existing in 1929 couldn't stand temperatures of more than say. About 500 degrees centigrade, but I knew or felt pretty confident that they would evolve in the normal course of development. And of course they did. The positive young officer also went to London to put his revolutionary concept to the Air Ministry. Whittle fared no better when he met a Griffith, one of the ministry's top scientists. I went to see a doctor Griffiths and another scientist at South Kensington explained the idea. It was very coolly received. Griffith pointed out an error in my calculations. And it was all rather depressing, though. And then after that I got a letter from the amnesty saying in effect that they weren't really interested and so forth. It didn't help that I hadn't then received an engineering degree. Soon after this rejection, Whittle seemed to have more bad news. After I completed the flying instructors course. I very nearly got posted to No. 4 FDS Abu Suwair in Egypt. That would have been a real nail in the coffin of the jet engine if that had happened. Fortunately, the posting was changed. Whittle remained in Britain and served a year as a flying instructor. These were happy times for him. In May 1930, he married Dorothy Lee. During this period, he also got the chance to develop his exceptional flying skills. He was now one of the RAF's best pilots and was chosen to fly in the Hendon Air pageants, where he thrilled spectators with his skills at Crazy Flying. These were the Red Arrows of the day, and whittle loved entertaining the public this way. At this time in Germany, a young scientist was eagerly looking forward to his first trip in an aeroplane. His name was Hans Von Ohain. I always dreamed about the beauty of flying. My first flight was a commercial airplane. I believe it was three. Engine. Junkers. was a great disappointment. It was so noisy and so vibratory that. I felt. The piston engine and propeller is not the good propulsion system. The elegance of flying is destroyed by it. The site of smoke rushing from chimneys inspired Von Ohain to think if that force could be created by a turbine. Maybe he could make a smoother aero engine. High speed was not the primary goal. To me the smoothness and low noise was more the starting point of my thinking. But as I thought about it, I noticed that as a matter of fact, it will be capable of driving the airplane faster. Britain's air industry had declined to keep Whittler patents a secret. Freely available, they quickly made their way to Germany just as the Nazis came to power. These patents were widely read in German aviation circles at the same time that Hitler was rapidly building a new Luftwaffe. Whittle's idea aroused no such interest in Great Britain and his own jet engine remained still born. Yet the Royal Air Force was certainly keen to nurture its inventor. After four years, every general duties officer had to specialize. He was given a choice between engineering, radio, navigation, physical training and so on. But I didn't get a choice because having been pestering the Air ministry with inventions, they just said to me, you will be an engineer. Though they'd stopped sending officers to Cambridge, they decided that I should go. So I went to Cambridge in September 34' to take the mechanical sciences tripos. Once at University, Whittle applied every piece of learning to his idea for Jet Propulsion. I had got the feeling rather than I might might be ahead of my time with the extra knowledge I gained at Cambridge, I did become rather more aware of the difficulties. Then this letter arrived in the post which says. My dear Whittle, this is just a hurried note to tell you that I have just met a man who is a bit of a big noise in an engineering concern, and to whom I mentioned your invention of an aeroplane solves propeller, as it were. And who is very interested. He's jotted a note at the top of the original letter, he says. This letter changed the course of my life and triggered a revolution in aviation. And it did, because this letter rescued the turbojet idea in this country from oblivion. The writer was Rolf Dudley Williams, an old friend from Cranwell. He visited Whittle at Cambridge with another former officer named Collingwood Tinling. And they approached me with the idea of forming a company and getting on with it, and they succeeded. A merchant bank was the catalyst. Falk & Partners were approached by an intermediary, an engineer named Bramson. Williams attending got in touch with him and he got in touch with Falk & Partners, and Falk & Partners commissioned him to write a report on the whole project, which he did, and it was wholly favorable. The Bramson's report, you might say, was another of the big. key points in the whole story, he'd been very much involved with aviation. He was a pretty skillful aeronautical engineer, and his report inspired Falk & Partners to go on with the job. And in March 1936 they formed the company called Power Jets Limited. Whittle told his backers the project had a one in thrity chance of success. The Air Ministry quickly added another obstacle. Tole (from the air ministry) said that I was not to work more than six hours a week on the job. But of course that didn't operate as a an effective. Control on me and I worked all the practically full timer. At Cambridge, Whittle also had to fit in the task for which he'd gone to university in the first place. And I very much wanted first class honours. So I had to work like Hell because I was designing the jet engine and preparing for my finals at the same time. And that was. A very difficult thing to do. I succeeded in getting my first happily and then was able to turn back to the jet engine. Whittle approached to manufacturer in rugby to build the world's first jet engine. British Thomson Houston made steam turbines. Whittle drove over from Cambridge, rehearsing what he'd say to persuade the huge company to accept a contract. He succeeded when all he could offer them was £2000, well below what his project really needed. The proper scientific way to go about the job would be to build a compressor and test it, build a turbine and test it, build combustion chambers and test it, and then put them all together when we the results from each were satisfactory. But the cost for that would have been about £30,000 and there was no hope of getting that amount of money. So the only way, the only thing to do was go ahead with the complete engine. What we were doing was. Trying to prove the engine right from the word go. In a cavernous rugby workshop Whittle set to work on this huge challenge. The BTH built the engine and I stood over it more or less while it was going on. I felt that we were going to be all right as far as the simple centrifugal compressor was concerned. I thought that I. The turbine going to be all right, but I was uneasy about the combustion problem because we were aiming at 24 times the kind of, in combustion intensity that was obtainable in those days. But the engine became ready for running proper on April the 12th of 1937. A lot of people said it wouldn't even turn itself over. What did happen? Prove the very opposite. That I gave a signal. With my hands to raise the speed. When the electric motors 2000 RPM and that was done and then I opened the main control. And it it had started alright. It's accelerated after control, and so did everyone standing around it. They all went down the factory like the wind. I didn't, because I was petrified with fright. I just couldn't move. It seemed like perpetual motion, but of course it wasn't. The fact was that of a pool of fuel that accumulated in the combustion chamber, which we didn't know about, and that was keeping it running after I'd switched off the control, well, that sort of thing happened day after day. We had about four. Of that kind of runaway. Just after the engine first ran and we'd submitted a report to the ministry. This was the subject of a another report by Griffith, the man who turned the job down in the early days, and his report damned it with faint praise. He brought in all the difficulties, said that no propeller meant that we wouldn't have the slipstream to help us take off and so forth. Whittle didn't know that in Germany, some people were by now far more willing to bet on his idea. One of them was Ernst Heinkel, A legend in his country's resurgent aviation industry. Von Ohein had been introduced to him. He was alone. In his villa in Warnemünde he explained to me. That he wanted to finance the whole thing by himself if it works. When he said I have the best aerodynamics list, I have that the best and best designers and. I want you to tomorrow. To speak with them and explain your ideas. I love the Baltic Sea course very much. I sure would think that would be a nice place to work. And. So I. True cycle. Additionally, I felt I was afraid to go to. In engine companies, I thought they were too much ingrained in their engines and my model didn't work sufficiently good. Hienkel's company was attractive for another reason. The whole development was very inexpensive, but when we would have asked for more money, we would have gotten it. So money was not a problem. By contrast, the power jets Kitty was empty. As the Nazi threat grew, Whittle had a war winner, yet Britain was set to abandon it. There were several things which hampered progress in 1937-38. The worst was the tight financial situation our financial backers began to get. cold feet. They had quite unrealistically expected that within a matter of a month or two we would have an engine capable of flying in the stratosphere. But of course we had breakdown after breakdown and then began to lose heart and they did not produce. The money that they promised. The Air Ministry were very hesitant to help because we were in financial difficulty after it first ran the engine And shown that it at least was self driving they did agree to. A very limited contract. The ministry's grudging help only created new problems. As soon as they gave us a contract, we came under the Official Secrets Act, and that meant that to we couldn't tell people what we wanted their money for. You can't go to someone and say, look, we've got a damn good idea. Would you let us have some money? We can't tell you what it is, but it's very good. No, it uh, we couldn't do it. By 1939 Britain had spent just £7000 on Whittle's jet. His very position on the project was perilous. At the end of June, he was actually due to leave power jets. On his last day there, Whittle had to impress an important visitor with his engine. On June 30th of 1939 we managed to. Get a big breakthrough in the attitude of the Air Ministry in that. The Pye director of Scientific research came up to see the engine run and we managed to keep it going for about 20 minutes in his presence and he became a complete convert. So much so that he agreed that an engine for flight should be ordered and that an aeroplane to use it should be ordered too. When I drove him back to the station to catch his train back to London. I had the curious experience of him explain to me all the advantages of the engine, that it could run on any fuel, that it was vibrationless etcetera, etcetera. And I just sat quietly. I was only a Squadron Leader at this time. I thought, yeah, you're telling me. Oh boy! This, of course, was the big turning point in the whole job. The turbojet was saved for Great Britain, but Germany, unaware of Whittle's breakthrough, already had a jet plane. I was very certain that it would work, but of course you always feel there's a danger. And we had made not too many feed? tests. We run the engine before it flew, perhaps several hours at the very most. The support of a huge aircraft company had enabled Hans von Ohain to overtake Whittle. Heinkels's. He-178 was ready just days before war broke out. Test pilot Erich Warsitz was eager to take off. He started and then he disappeared and after a while he came back. And we thought all his landing he didn't. He went another round and we said, Oh my God, he must like it. But we didn't have the airplane very filled up with gasoline. He landed and stopped the airplane just behind where Heinkel stood and he said everything functioned beautiful and and and the engine worked well and he was he was really himself very enthused. We had a nice festival. A jubilant Hinkel rang general Ernst Udet at the German Air Ministry. I learned later on he called Udet and he said yeah, congratulation but let me sleep, that's a ungodly time. By now, Frank Whittle had been forced to move power jets from Rugby to a scruffy foundry at nearby Lutterworth. Ladywood works was the name of the site. Today, there's nothing to show that history was once made here. But in these buildings, Britain slowly expanded its jet programme. In 1939 we only had the one of just a handful of about half a dozen and then beginning of 1942 began to build up a team and I was very careful in picking. Real quality. You know, first class honors Cambridge first class honors Oxford, Imperial College of Science. We were advertising. Of course we couldn't say what we were advertising for. And when we're interviewing them, we couldn't tell them what we wanted them for, though I think some of them guessed from the questions we asked. Whittles charm and enthusiasm at once inspired his new team to strive for the impossible. The noise and lack of space at Ladywood forced Whittle himself to work at Brownsover hall, a country house nearby. Here he worked through the night, desperately aware that his work could shorten the war, and drove himself to nervous exhaustion. My memory of him really was that just somebody always working. And when he was at home, if he took any time off, say Sunday, he would sit in his chair by the fire at Broomfield and we'd be there with his slide rule, which of course people used in those days to do their calculations and bits of paper all over the place working. And a little bit of time for myself and my brother, but not much, not much. As Britain entered its most critical phase of the war, the expanding team at Ladywood was galvanized by a new order to prepare engines for a prototype jet fighter. Code named F-940, we know it as the Gloster Meteor. As a potential war winner, getting it in the sky to fight the Luftwaffe now became the focus of their work and power jets. They did not know that Germany was by now developing its own twin jet combat planes at Messerschmitt and Heinkel, the country's prototype jet. The He 178 had not been a success, but its last flight was exploited to the full by its maker. Heinkel invited the Air Ministry to come and the highest who came was Udet and somehow Heinkel used that possibility to offer a new design of a two engine fighter aircraft. And actually he got the contract about two months later. The plane was the HE 280. The Nazis wanted it in 14 months. Heinkel passed this demanding deadline to follow Hein to build its jet engines. Well heinkel Wanted things very fast. He was very. Optimistic, very positive, but a little bit unreal and unrealistic in his time schedules. In Britain, the Air ministry still wouldn't fund Frank Whittle properly, forcing power jets to work in impossible conditions. In addition to our continuing financial problems, we had many others like having to use the same parts over and over again when they ought to have been scrapped and of course that was linked with the finance because we couldn't afford new parts, we had to make do and furbish up damaged parts. Some people continued to claim Whittle's Jet wouldn't even fly. By May 1941, his engine was ready to go in Britain's first jet plane, the experimental Gloster E. 28/39. For its maiden flight, the top secret aircraft was taken to Cranwell, where the jet story had begun. The Power Jets team followed, full of hope. On the same day, a young naval pilot, Eric Brown, was forced to land at Cranwell. Today, he's one of the few surviving witnesses of this historic occasion. When when I landed, I was a bit astonished to find so many civilians present, and when I went to check in at the mess. And asked, What was going on? There seemed to be almost an air of conspiracy about the whole place and nobody would give a straight answer to this. We've been out the day before for taking some taxing trials and then on the May the 15th the weather looked as though it wasn't going to work out so I went back to Lutterworth. That morning I went to the control tower to check. If the weather was good enough for my own good flight to Croydon, but it obviously wasn't and they said would I mind doing a weather check for them? Anyway, I landed and they said would I be prepared to do a further weather test in the afternoon? And then we got a message to say the weather was clearing. So I rushed back to Cranwell again, and in the evening, Jerry said; did the flight. An airplane was rolled out. With a shape I had, well, not so much to shape, but the construction of which I've never seen before because it had no propeller and an extraordinary whining noise came from it and it taxied out to the end of the runway. And after a while, eventually took off. And I was quite astonished to know what it was because I'd never heard at this stage in my career or a jet aircraft. The various government ministries refused to film this remarkable event. Luckily, an unknown photographer grabbed it in secret. Jerry was there sitting at the end of the runway and partly I was sitting just to the right and he held it on the brakes and ran out the engine to full speed, released his brakes and then he hopped off in about 600 yards. Quite an impressive takeoff and he held it down level and then climbed. One of my colleagues, Pat Johnson, W.E.P. Johnson, slap me on the back, he said. Frank, it flies. And then the tension of the moment, I rather rudely said that was bloody. Well what it was designed to do, isn't it? Umm. And it landed successfully and immediately it landed, it was absolutely. Inundated with people rushing out and congratulating the pilot, so I realized something quite extraordinary taking place. People in the area hadn't heard that particular kind of noise before, and you couldn't really hide it, however secret was supposed to be. But one officer was said to have asked another one. How does that thing work John? And John replied, Oh, it's easy, old boy. It just sucks itself along like a Hoover. Another story was that someone who claimed to have been an eyewitness said there was a Merlin engine inside the hollow fuselage with the little propeller. And he he seen it. He was. Reliable witness, he claimed. Well, everybody gravitated towards the officers mess. And so I followed on and there was quite a lot of hilarity going on in a corner of the room. I asked what it was all about, but still nobody would reveal what was involved. But it was quite obvious it was something. Quite momentous. The flight vindicated whittle. Britain's new jet plane was better than anybody had realised. One event particularly brought the point home. The ministry gave us permission to open up to 17,000 just for one flight and at that engine speed it did 375 or 380 anyway, it was faster than the Spitfire. The news reached London and Winston Churchill. He ordered 1000 whittles. Alas, the E 28 could not be a warplane, hence the disappointment felt behind the scenes up at Cranwell. I would have preferred it to have been the meteor which was then on the stocks because that was the combat airplane, whereas the E- 28 was just an experimental airplane. Whittles Jet served notice on all piston engines a notice that fast reached their manufacturers. They now demanded their share of a product none had invented and which they'd rejected for years. Because of the war, Whittle would have to share his secrets with them. All this, of course, is putting power jets into a weaker and weaker position from the commercial point of view. And that we had to swallow because it's a wartime situation and I and several other of my team were serving officers and we had to put national considerations before commercial considerations. That was very dominant in my mind. Whittle played a selfless, patriotic role in which he offered his knowledge freely to the British aviation companies. However, they were working flat out to build engines for planes like the hurricane and the Spitfire. So in 1941, Great Britain turned to the United States, then at peace for backup in manufacturing its jet engine. The Americans had only been told about Whittle's power plant earlier that year. Ironically, their top scientists had dismissed the concept in 1940. They concluded the gas turbine engine could hardly be considered a feasible application to airplanes. The British government expected to keep the rights in Whittle's invention and did not intend to give it away to a future competitor. But that's inevitably what happened. We shipped over the engine in parts in the Bomb bay of a Liberator and also with the team who were horribly frightened less the pilot should pull the wrong lever and they'd all drop into the Atlantic. The company selected to build the engine was General Electric. For America, The Jets story began the night of October 4th, 1941 with the arrival of a highly secret engine assembly in a Boston airport. It was Britain's now famous Whittle turbojet, the first jet engine successfully produced and flown by the ally. Gentlemen. I give you the whittle engine. Consult all you wish and arrive at any decision you please, just as long as you accept a contract to build 15 of them. General Electric had that engine, their engine version of the W2B called the Type I on test in April of 40 twos, just rather less than six months, which is astonishing. And even better than that, six months later, the Bell Aircraft Company had their twin engine jet flying. It was agreed that I would go over and help them out. And so I went over at the end of May. I went to Lynn under an assumed name. They insisted I used an assumed name. I call myself Whitely were times when I forgot it. Like in the hotel I would sign waking up, sign for my early morning coffee, and forget that I was supposed to be using an assumed name. And of course I'm the real one. I'm told that that didn't matter, really, because the waiter was an FBI man. In the Great Republic, Whittle was treated royally and he in turn was astounded by what he found there. It was most satisfying to see the work GE were doing because, well, they got on with the job so fast. It was remarkable. And their enthusiasm. Was most inspiring and I thought at the time, if only I had had that kind of cooperation a few years earlier. What a difference it would have made. In America, doctors found that Whittle was by now battling with severe ill health. Back in Britain, the problems that caused it had only got worse. The engine that was destined to be the power plant of the meteor was a more powerful version of the experimental engine really. There were no major differences. It looked quite similar from the outside. The Royal Air Force eagerly awaited the meteor, but power jets was not allowed to produce the engines for it. That job had been contracted to a car maker Rover. Glosters were getting on with the job fairly well, but Rovers were making an absolute nonsense of the engine. They kept that they just hadn't got the people who could do the job and they thought they they thought they knew what to do. The situation became so bad that it looks as though there would be a complete hash of everything. The Rover,the Rovers were making such a poor job of the engine that the order for the production of the meeting was cut right back. Rover tried to redesign its engines and held up the meteor by two years. But there was also dirty work. We intended that the Rover company should be subcontractors and only subcontractors, but unfortunately they went behind our back to the ministry and and trying to get direct contracts and eventually they succeeded in doing that and instead of being subcontracted to us in effect became competitors. Who had the advantage of having all our information handed to them on the orders of the ministry. In December 1942, a solution was at last found to the problems with Rover. Rolls Royce took over the job of building whittle's engines. But the mighty company would only weaken power jets further. Ernest Heiz was the chief executive of Rolls Royce. He was responsible for the Rolls Royce part in taking over the jet development because he he had come to realize that this was the future of the Aeroengine. And since Rolls Royce then were one of the most prominent aeroengine firms in the world, he wasn't going to be left out. I would call him an honest rogue. Because when he was going to do the dirty, he told you he was in advance and one of the things that he said to me on one occasion was he said we're going to be at the centre of this job and nothing you you can do will stop us. By 1943, yeah, the Rolls-Royce having made such a big difference to the prospects of the engine, the ministry agreed to reinstate the production of the meteor. With whittles engines, the plane finally made its first flight that year. Yet it should have been ready two years earlier, and had the ministry pursued Whittle's idea back in 1929, a similar plane would have been available by the start of the war to repel the Luftwaffe. Lives would have been saved, the war even shortened. At least the work of Frank Whittle could now have a bearing on how that war was fought. I thought that he was doing something quite important because every time I asked my mother what he was doing, she used to say, Oh well, Daddy is doing something very hush, hush. I didn't become aware that he was anybody out of the ordinary until 1944 in January, when they made the whole thing public, and then the House became surrounded by reporters. We we had been working in complete secrecy until early January 1944, at which time, for reasons I don't really know, the British and American governments decided to make an announcement about it. It was like the world blew up around me. The shock was very considerable. Whittle and his engine dominated the front pages. Says here in the Daily Herald. I knew Frank had a secret, says his wife. So the cat is out of the bag. How strange it seems to be able to talk about it. It may mean that I shall be known throughout the world. In any case, my younger son Ian is a far brighter boy than I was at his age. I think he will be a success, the success of the family. No, I've never seen that before. Oh dear, how wrong. As industry reaped the rewards of Whittle's genius, new jet fighters joined the Meteor. First off, the drawing board was De Havilland's brilliant vampire. The pilots loved their new equipment, although the planes remained highly secret, as Eric Brown discovered when he came to fly them. When I was allotted to the jet flight at Farnborough, of course it was a top secret flight and it was in a hangar at the far side of the airfield, well away from the main activity. And there were RAF Regiment guards there with guard dogs. It was very highly guarded at the time. Once inside, the plane was a revelation to brown. We're getting into the cockpit of a Jet airplane for the first time. You are struck by the wonderful view because in a tricycle undercarriage, no propeller or large engine ahead of you, it is quite remarkable. And once you start up the engine, although to listen to a jet, if you're outside the cockpit it sounds thunderous. When you're in the cockpit it is incredibly quiet. Frank Whittle often visited Farnborough to check how his invention was performing. Quite obvious he was itching to get his hands on it and fly it, but we were always alerted that he was coming and a little memo would be passed around saying would you make sure that the 28/39 was not serviceable for flight on that particular day. And because this would stave off Frank, it was obvious they didn't want this wonderful airplane and this wonderful man to be united in case there was a an accident. So he twigged this pretty soon, and I think he played along with it. In July 1944, the Gloster Meteor became the first jet fighter to enter operational service when the Air Force allocated its initial supply of planes to 616 Squadron at Manston in Kent. By now the Luftwaffe could no longer mount air raids over Britain, but these meteors were quickly put to work, intercepting a lethal new menace, the V1 guided missile. Germany's flying bomb terrified the Londoners who were its target. In the skies over Kent, the Meteor pilot sought to prevent V1s reaching the capital. Some used their wing tips to flip the missile over so it crashed. Around this time, Allied pilots were startled to find themselves being attacked by a German plane with no propeller. This was the Messerschmitt 262. Germany's own jet programme had by now advanced to this sophisticated design. It had been chosen instead of the He 280. The Nazis never liked Heinkel and had cancelled his promising jet fighter. Yet it could have been mass produced by 1944. By contrast, the 262 arrived late and was rushed into battle too soon. In Britain, meanwhile, Frank Whittle seemed at his peak. He was a national hero. While his company now had a custom built factory from which to expand, he had a clear vision for its future. I always wanted to include manufacturing in our duties. In 1944, our power jets had reached the point where they were able to produce say batches of 40 or 50 engines and we had a first class nucleus for proper manufacturing organization. Power jets also had some outstanding work in progress. Whittle was already planning the second generation of jet engines. There was the LR1 Turbofan, which would have been the first turbofan in the world. There was the engine for the Miles M 52, the supersonic aeroplane. Those are our two big projects which we had in hand. LR1 stood for long range one. Whittle saw the scope for jets that would fly planes further, as well as faster than Pistons. But he would need a more efficient engine. From the earliest days of the turbojet engine, I was bothered by the fact That it has a basically low propulsive efficiency. About 50% as compared with their propeller at moderate speeds of 80%. And so the answer to me was that we must gear down the jet in some way, and that led to the concept of the turbofan, for which I took out a patent in 1936. The turbofan is a turbo jet to which a fan has been added. This fan causes air both to flow through the core of the engine and to bypass it. This additional jet of cold air increases thrust and improves fuel economy. The design had huge potential. With a turbofan you can expect propulsive efficiencies of 75% or even better if you have a very large bypass ratio. As piston engine bombers approached their design limits with planes like the Lancaster, Whittle saw a timely use for his new bypass jet. As the war progressed in 1943 for example, I came to the conclusion that it could be the answer to a long range bomber for the Pacific War. We also visualise it as an engine for transatlantic airplane. Whittle was already predicting long range jet airliners and the kind of engines they would need. But it was the other Powerjet project that would grab people's attention. The engine for the supersonic plane, the M52, was an aft fan with afterburning that at all tacked onto the back end of the W-2 700 jet engine and that should have given sufficient power for the miles M52 to do 1,000 miles an hour. I think it would have done it. Despite its huge potential, Whitehall never felt comfortable with power jets. It was a private company, but its driving force was a serving officer and it was publicly funded. The fault lines were clear. I realized that there was a complete mess from the contractual point of view. There was no there were no effective agreements and no one except power jets would risk any money except the government of course. And I felt that the government having put in 2 million, that all the companies should be nationalized. forming a collective turbojet establishment. And of course I hope the power jets would be the um, at the, top of the pyramid. With myself as chief engineer. Whittle's proposal was considered in the high levels of government. So Stafford Cripps, the Minister of aircraft production at that time, used what I'd said. To get the ministry out of the mess that they created by nationalizing power jets only. Which relieve them of all their undertakings. It was expected that power jets would still continue with its advanced engine projects. But then other firms began to. Create difficulties, they said. They weren't going to have the government competing with private enterprise, so considerable pressure brought to bear on the the ministry. And the minister caved in to the large aeroengine companies. So we, the people who had pioneered the whole thing, were deprived of the right to design and build engines. That was too much for myself and my leading team members and most of us resigned. The supersonic plane and the turbofan project had by then been cancelled. The civil servants found a reason to justify this loss. Believe it or not, the minister said that people wouldn't want to fly at speeds more than about 250 miles an hour. As Whittle left power jets, he was acutely aware of the commercial opportunity that was now at stake. The position in 1945 and 1950 was that Britain was really ahead of the world in all forms of gas serving development, but stupidly we allowed the lead to slip away. 1945 The Allies discovered the Germans impressive range of jet planes and their designers. After the capitulation of Germany. I was at that time in Farnborough the CO of the captured enemy aircraft flight, so I was sent to Germany and to look at their advanced aircraft and also at the same time to interrogate their designers and test pilots. Amongst them was Von ohain, and naturally I wanted to know what his. Connection with. the Whittle patent had a patent had been in Germany. But he was not going to answer this question. He was very noncommittal and sidestepped as much as he could. Brown flew the various German jet planes, including the Messerschmitt 262. The allies already knew that its engine, the Jumo 004, was a sophisticated axial flow design. Now they could compare its performance with that of the less complex British jets. Thought a more efficient engine in many ways it was highly unreliable. The Jumo 004 in operational service had a scrap life of only 25 hours. And the engine. When I flew this engine, I found it extremely sensitive and difficult to handle because it did not like quick throttle movements, either accelerating or decelerating. Any quick throttle movement either way could possibly cause a flame out of the engine. Whittle's jets were more reliable, but he could take them no further. The course of events brought anguish. I think my mother was most distressed by what was happening to to father. She was most distressed. I'm. I could remember her crying about it at times because she would tell me, oh, Daddy's so unwell because of what's happening and it is such a shame. And how can they treat him like this? Yes, it's very sad for her. He's managed to soldier on in the RAF and he was an air Commodore in 1946, but in the end, by 1948, he'd been declared as unfit for flying and somehow that triggered that was the last straw and he, he and the RAF both agreed that he should retire, and he did. Very sad. Very sad. Yes. The Air Force was ever everything to him. The public knew none of this and saw a war hero receiving his just rewards. In 1948 Whittle went to Buckingham Palace to collect a knighthood. He also had a financial award for his invention which was good for the time, worth nearly £3 million to day. It would soon become clear he was greatly under rewarded. He sought a role, but his stature made him hard to place in an industry he himself had founded. No engine maker hired his services. In many ways I paid quite heavily for. The the work I did there was the. Awful race against time. That dominated life. On top of all the technical difficulties that were the financial difficulties, there was the skulduggery of people who were messing things up and. Oh, it was frustration after frustration, and it took its toll. I began to have a series of nervous breakdowns. And for years, it was years before I really recovered my health. Britain stole a March on the rest of the world when it launched the first jet airliner. The beautiful new plane with its four engines was a fruition of all Frank whittle's early visions. First after he left the RAF, he turned his mind to the introduction of the comet and he joined BOAC as a consultant to help them introduce the comet into service. But he was very worried at the time that the thing was being rushed into service. I've got his 1949 diary where he discusses the strength of the square windows and he was worried about that at the time and was making a suggestion to De Havilland's and how they could. Get over the problem. Whittlers advice was ignored. The comet crashes which followed were caused in part by its square windows. With time on his hands, Whittle travelled and tried to recover his health. He also turned to writing his memoirs. The Jet Age took off without Frank Whittle, but the Royal Air Force was soon re equipped with the benefits of his invention. By 1950 the Gloster Meteor provided the backbone of Britain's air defence capability. It was a fitting outcome to all the secret toil of the power Jets team in the dark days of the war. The nation did at last build its own supersonic fighter in the shape of the English electric Lightning. While jet engines also powered an awesome British fleet of nuclear bombers. But the country could never really afford such planes. They would later play an important role in the Falklands campaign, but were destined to become museum pieces. The British civil jet planes fared little better after the comet crashes. It was Boeing 707 which brought long range jet travel to the masses. By 1960, airlines were mostly buying their planes from America. That year, the bypass engine entered service. Turbofans soon followed. with their far better fuel economy, they were just what the airlines needed to realize low cost global travel. For Frank Whittle, it was the ultimate vindication of his wartime vision and revealed the sheer folly of cancelling his pioneer turbofan. Yet he never worked on jet engines again, and memories began to fade of how the story had begun. I think in this country they were beginning to forget all about Frank Whittle by the 60s and 70s. It was all so different in the United States. They were so much more gung ho. They were very good at slapping him on the back and telling him what a good chap he was. In 1976, Whittle went to live in America. I think he felt more recognised over in the states than he did over here. After the war, Hans von Ohain had himself moved to America to work on Jet Propulsion for the US Air Force. Fascinated by each other's work, Whittle and Von Ohain became good friends. Back across the Atlantic, Britain eventually rediscovered its genius of the jet. By 1986 even um The Queen took a hand and ordered him the Order of Merit. And other honours came along following that. So I would say from about the early 80s onwards people began to remember who it was who was the prime pioneer of the turbojet. And also a man with a profound legacy. Today we make almost one and a half billion air passenger journeys a year, cheaply and safely, thanks to Frank Whittle. He shrank the world, but his gift to Britain is less appreciated. Its famous plane makers have departed, but today Rolls Royce is a world leader in building jet engines. I'm often asked how I feel about it, and it's a question I find very difficult to answer. Things could have been a lot better. We could have had a much bigger influence than the war than happened, but when I see what's happened in in the way of Civil Aviation and military aviation too, but particularly Civil Aviation, I can only say it's extremely satisfying. Especially when you see something like the Concorde. And one of the things you see I never foresaw when I was working on this thing is that I would be a passenger crossing the Atlantic in three and a half hours. And incidentally another thing I didn't foresee is that I would have a son who would be flying 747s as a captain in Cathay Pacific. Kai Tak aerodrome at Hong Kong was had a very interesting approach, curved right hand turn right down to almost a touchdown and when Father came with me in the back of the in the cockpit in a Boeing 747. He he was very startled when he saw that his son was flying an airplane at 1000 feet straight towards the foothills and then making a a steep final turn, which of course was quite normal at Kai Tak. It was the way you had to do it. I hadn't briefed him, unfortunately, so he was, he was very white knuckled by the time we landed. He was continuing to theorize in aerodynamic improvements and aero engine improvements until the end of his life. He always took an active interest in Concorde and looking into a second generation SST, supersonic transport and making recommendations and speaking publicly. And privately amongst the industry to try and encourage the airframe manufacturers to. Take the risk and embark on another generation of supersonic transports. The Concord is marvelous aeroplane. I've flown it many times, but I'm looking forward to the next generation of supersonic transports, which I think should be capable of carrying 300 passengers. For distances of the order of 4,500 miles, like San Francisco-Tokyo at speeds of about a Mach number of about 2.3 that we're getting up to 2,000 miles an hour as compared with the Concords 1,350. But beyond that, I think we're going to see even much higher speeds than that in due course. Unfortunately, they're going to be very expensive propositions. Sir Frank Whittle died in August 1996, assured of his position as the greatest aero engineer of the 20th century. The Royal Air Force paid fitting tribute to its distinguished son with the memorial service at Westminster Abbey. He and I had wanted the opportunity to fly together. Preferably in an open cockpit biplane so that together we could loop and spin and climb and dive. This modest ambition was never realised for one reason or another. The nearest we got was when I flew him to Hong Kong in a Boeing 747. On the last morning of his life. I leant over his bed and said. Dad. Let's put on our kit and go flying. He opened his eyes and looked at me. And smiled. That evening. With Hazel holding his hand, he died. And I wondered. I wondered if he went flying. And if he did If he went on his own. Or did he have a companion. He was cremated in the USA. And the air attaché there um brought his ashes over to this country. And I went to Heathrow to meet the airplane, and I came home and put the ashes on the bookshelf in my study with the ashes of my mother, who died three weeks earlier. I had decided to put them in at the Church of Cranwell, and they organized a a meteor and a vampire. So we flew the ashes up to Cranwell, and they were in interred there with a little ceremony.
